Past Tense
by ginny29
Summary: Twenty five years after the end of the Wars, Zechs and his family have built the peace they fought for. Will the return of a ghost, however much longed for, shatter that peace by bringing forward the echoes of the past? Multiple Pairings, and the odd OC!
1. Chapter 1

**Past Tense**

_Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new. _

_Secrets are stolen from deep inside.  
_

_If you're lost, you can look, and you will find me _

_Time after time._

.

_After my picture fades and darkness has turned to grey.  
_

_Flashbacks, warm nights almost left behind _

_The drum beats out o__f time_

_If you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting._

_Time after time.  
_

.

_Time after Time – Cyndi Lauper_

_._

_._

_.  
_

"Milliardo… I'll be waiting on the other side…."

The words were soft, but still clear, the tone sure despite being breathless. Treize felt his lungs struggle for the air that was no longer there, choking as he drew in nothing but poisonous smoke. His eyes burned and watered as he fought to see the controls that were searing his hands as they shorted and overheated.

Tallgeese bucked under his hands, fighting him as he forced the suit up and away from the Gundam. He'd used the little pilot enough for one day – Treize wasn't about to risk causing the boy an injury with what he knew he had to do next.

Arcing electricity burned through his body, forcing cries of pain from him that he wouldn't have ever let anyone else hear. He coughed and felt a vague amount of shock as bright red blood flooded the back of his throat and spilled to dye his uniform jacket and stain his breeches.

The world went grey at the edges as he lost all sense of orientation. It didn't matter; there was only one thing he had left to do.

The button depressed smoothly under his grasping fingers and Treize's world flared into nothing but blinding white light.

The Tallgeese vaporised and its pilot fell.

* * *

"Feliu?"

A woman's voice jarred shattered senses, the sound too much despite the speaker having low, pleasantly modulated tones. Treize could feel every inch of his body screaming its agony at him, nerve endings seared, organs torn, bones broken. He'd been under the impression that his death would stop all pain, but if this was Heaven, then God wasn't living up to His promises.

And if it were Hell, then Lucifer needed to redecorate. The white marble Treize was kneeling on was not a good choice of schemes, all things considered

"Felix? What are you doing here? I thought you were in Bordeaux till the end of the month?"

Treize tried to look up at the second speaker, the rich baritone voice hauntingly familiar, and succeeded only in making the world reel around him. He whimpered helplessly and then cried out in protest as someone gripped him by the shoulders and held him upright, bracing him even as they shook him lightly in an attempt to get his attention.

"Cousin?" The man's voice had taken on shades of worry. "If this is your idea of a joke, it's not funny. Wearing that outfit again is asking for trouble, and covering it in fake blood is a bit much, even for me." There was another, more vicious shake. "Felix!"

Treize tried to draw enough air to explain that he wasn't Felix, that he had no idea who Felix was, that the uniform was his own and that the blood wasn't faked, and found himself coughing and choking on bitterly salty, coppery fluid. He swallowed hard and it burned like acid, roiling in his stomach.

It was a relief to retch. He collapsed against the support the other man was giving him and gave himself over to the convulsions. The man swore frantically and the woman screamed in horror as the marble was splashed crimson with blood.

"Jesus Christ! Felix!"

There was a clatter of heeled shoes on the hard floor and then a flurry of skirts as the woman sank to her knees next to the two men. "Oh, my God!" she exclaimed and suddenly her voice was familiar to Treize. "Feliu! Darling!"

Treize coughed to clear his throat, looking up to confirm what his ears were telling him, unable to understand it. "D…Dors?" he managed, when what he saw just confused him more. The woman in front of him was his niece, he was sure of it – her voice, hair, eyes and familiar eyebrows all said so, beyond any doubt – but she was also at least ten years his senior in age, a woman on the edge of a graceful middle age and not the hell-raising teenager he'd last seen less than a month before.

She gasped, one hand going to her mouth to cover the expression. "Where did you hear that name?" she demanded. "No-one calls me that."

Treize shook his head again. "I've… always…" he choked, struggling to form the words. " Dorothy?" he asked plaintively, when she closed her eyes.

The man supporting Treize seemed to take objection to something in the woman's expression because he gave Treize another shake, this one hard enough to snap his teeth together and trigger another wave of gasped retching. "Gah!" he exclaimed, as Treize threw up blood and bile. "Steady, cousin," he soothed, a moment later. "What the hell have you been doing to yourself?!"

Pain was flooding through Treize, setting off dizzying trembles in his muscles as he swallowed, ignoring the vile taste, and fought to find the words to explain. Palest gold, silver-gilt hair flickered in a corner of his vision as the other man leaned over him and tried to hand him a soft linen handkerchief.

Recognition was instant. "…Zechs…?"

"Yes, I'm Aleks. Glad to see you know at least one of us!" The young man laughed, but the sound was hollow, covering frantic worry and not a little panic. "Should we call a Doctor?" he asked, a moment later.

The woman was staring at Treize as though she'd seen a ghost. "Aleks, get your father," she instructed, reaching out one elegant hand hesitantly to touch the stained fabric of Treize's jacket.

"What?" the other man wondered. "Wouldn't Sally Po be a better choice?"

"Your father, Aleksander! Now!"

Ignoring the edges of her skirts trailing in the mess on the floor, the woman reached out and took Treize's weight from the man, taking the handkerchief as well and moving to clean away some of the blood from his face.

There was a moment of silence, and then heavy, running footsteps as the younger man obeyed the orders held been given.

"Dors?" Treize wondered again, desperate for an anchor of any sort. This was nothing like he'd imagined Death to be.

"If you are who you appear to be – and I don't even think I can begin to understand how you can be – then, yes, I'm Dorothy." Her hands dropped the ruined hankie and settled on Treize's face, cool as they lifted his head so their eyes could meet. "Well, you certainly aren't my son," she continued after a moment. "So I shan't have to go to the trouble of horse-whipping you for wearing that stupid costume again. Where did you get the uniform?"

Treize frowned, so far beyond confused he couldn't think clearly. "It's…mine," he answered uselessly, not knowing what else to say. "Your _son_?!" he choked, a second later, as Dorothy's words processed properly.

The woman sighed. "Yes, my son. Feliu Maxwell. The resemblance between him and … certain male relatives of his is startling." She summoned a smile that Treize recognised only too well as that of a politician. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"Dreadful," Treize answered her hoarsely. "Maxwell?" he quizzed, wondering if that meant what he thought it did.

Dorothy let him go and waved the question away. "A long story, and not one for you to worry about now, I think." She tilted her head, levelling him a look from eyes that hadn't changed at all. "If I may offer you a word of advice?" she began. "Brace yourself as best you can. I think the next few hours are going to be rather shocking for you."

The irony of that comment made Treize laugh weakly, and the sound was ragged and raw. "A moment ago I was being electrocuted to death," he whispered. "I've done with shocking for the duration, I think. It might be hard to top." He stopped laughing as suddenly as he had started, acknowledging to himself that he was dangerously close to his limits. "Am I dead?" he asked flatly, making Dorothy blink and raise a wry eyebrow.

"Tallgeese?" she asked, but she didn't give him time to answer. "Yes, you are," she told him, "but, no, apparently, you aren't. And I have no idea how that can be, so please don't ask me." She smiled, genuinely this time. "Death hasn't hurt your sense of humour, it seems," she commented. "Do you think you can stand? This floor is not meant for kneeling on."

Treize stared at his niece helplessly for a few breaths, then bit his lip and nodded. Whatever was going on, whatever was about to happen that Dorothy thought would surprise him so, he would be best to face it on his feet, if he could.

He watched as she stood gracefully, shaking out her skirts with a complete lack of care for the stains on them, and then bent down to offer him her hands.

Gripping them carefully, Treize pushed slowly to his feet, feeling his balance skitter as though he were drunk as the effort made him light-headed. He steadied remarkably quickly, and frowned as he realised that his didn't feel nearly as injured as he'd thought he was. He could breathe nearly normally now, would probably be able to talk that way, too, if he could have something to ease his throat. His hands hadn't felt burned when Dorothy had taken them and the agony of broken bones and damaged tissues was rapidly fading to little more than a dull ache.

He straightened to his customary posture and tugged his uniform into place, scowling at the state of it, then ran one hand back through his hair to neaten it. No, he still didn't feel well, but he'd faked good health from worse starting positions in the past. He'd manage.

The hand smoothing his hair came to rest on the bridge of his nose for a fraction of a second as Treize's eyes closed and he took a deep breath, and then he let it out slowly and turned an alert gaze on his niece.

Dorothy drew a sharp breath, clenching her hands together so that the knuckles went white. "If you're a fraud, you're an exceptional one," she murmured. "I've never seen anyone get that gesture just so."

Treize gave her a puzzled look and opened his mouth to ask her what she meant. He stopped as two sets of footsteps approached, seeing Dorothy glance over his shoulder at what he assumed was a door. He made to turn to look and she caught his wrist to stop him. "For his sake, if not your own," she murmured under her breath.

For whose sake? Treize wondered.

"Doro, what the hell is going on?" somebody said from the doorway, voice sharp with enquiry. "Aleks just told me the wildest tale about Felix and you and…. What the hell happened to my floor? Is that blood?!"

Treize shuddered. That voice was seared into his body at every level. How had he ever mistaken it for anyone else's? "Zechs…." he whispered, and he could hear the world of emotion beneath his tone.

Dorothy shot him a quelling look. "Yes, it's blood," she replied, letting him go and stepping around to put herself between the two men. "And Feliu has nothing to do with this, but you can worry about all that later. I strongly suggest you sit down."


	2. Chapter 2

Treize didn't need to see him to know that Zechs had just shaken his head, a stubborn frown setting between his pale eyebrows. "Don't play games with me, Doro," he answered sharply. "How can the boy have nothing to do with it when he's stood behind you?"

"This isn't Feliu." Dorothy gestured helplessly, watching as her old friend stared at the back of Treize's head, recognition welling slowly in his eyes. "Milliardo, I don't begin to understand," she started, hoping to get through at least part of an explanation before he made the leap she knew he was going to make, "but…."

"Treize…?" Zechs whispered, interrupting her without a care for it.

Dorothy closed her eyes and bowed her head. "I thought so too," she admitted softly, feeling Treize shiver at Zechs's use of his name, and wondering when she'd become so very certain that the man behind her was, in fact, Treize Khushrenada. The situation was nigh on unbelievable, Dorothy knew, but she couldn't help feeling some very private worries she'd been keeping to herself for some time now start to lift away. If she could just manage the next few minutes….

"Treize? How…?" Milliardo was across the room in a flash, reaching past her as though she weren't there and putting a hand on Treize's shoulder. Dorothy saw the general steel himself and turn as Zechs tugged, his sapphire eyes – unique and never forgotten by anyone who'd ever gotten close enough to look directly into them – alight with a storm of feeling.

Treize ignored the shocked cry Zechs gave, ignored the way the blonde's grip became instantly painfully tight on his shoulder, ignored everything but the man in front of him and the look in his pale blue eyes.

For a half-second, there was nothing but the two of them, as it had always been. Neither man saw anything but the other, and their expressions were mirrors of each other – hope and hunger, unspoken loneliness and undying love. Dorothy flicked a glance at her Godson, her own son's closest friend, and wondered if he understood what he was seeing. There was something in his expression that said he did, and, not for the first time, Dorothy was grateful that there was more of his mother to Aleksander than his amethyst eyes. The Latin passions he'd inherited from Noin were a necessary balance to Zechs's Nordic chill, a match for Dorothy's own Spanish fire. The woman had a feeling she was going to need Aleks to get through what she knew was coming, and she was going to need him reacting from his gut, from the stories he'd heard of the man his father had lost before he was born and with all the Italian love for Romance Lucrezia had ever possessed.

She looked back to the two older men, seeing a world of meaning in the way Treize was clasping Zechs's forearm and watching as they both moved simultaneously to close the gap between them. She willed them to stay under the spell shock had created for them just a little longer, wanting them to yield to their instincts and kiss. Everything that had to follow would be so much easier if they had that indefinable, unmistakeable knowledge of the others' identity the simple, physical exchange would give them.

She bit her lip as the stunned expression began to fade from Zechs's face, wincing as too-familiar shutters slammed down behind crystal blue eyes, fury and pain flooding over everything else and erasing it.

The change jolted Treize enough to look at the rest of the man, the line of his body tensing abruptly as he failed to recognise what he saw.

In a matter of a heartbeat, the air was crackling with anger and mistrust, open hostility and stubborn confusion.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Zechs hissed suddenly, his voice like a lash. "Do you find this funny?"

Treize jumped as though stung. "Milliardo…?" he whispered, still staring. He was trying to process, Dorothy could see, trying to make what his eyes were seeing and his head was telling him square with what his gut was insisting on and not quite managing it. He simply didn't have the resources.

It was enough to push her past her own blinkered take on things, so that she saw, for the first time, not the perfect officer who'd been her childhood idol, but a bewildered and hurt young man not all that much older than her own son.

The realisation made her move to him before she knew was doing it, her hand coming to rest on his arm as she opened her mouth to defend him.

"Not to you," Zechs answered Treize coldly, at the same moment. "Dorothy, step away from him. Aleks, find Heero and have him call Une." Zechs's eyes still hadn't left Treize, who'd flinched under Dorothy's hands at the icy response. "Who sent you?" he demanded. "When are you people going to realise that this doesn't work!"

"Miri…?" Treize asked again, unconsciously using a nickname for Zechs very few people even knew existed, his voice slipping just slightly from its perfect tutored accent to that of his homelands. Dorothy couldn't help but wonder what he was seeing. Zechs had changed just as she knew she had changed and the smooth faced youth Treize had known had long since faded away in favour of a tall, powerful man who looked fifteen years older than Treize, and more than two decades older than the Zechs Treize had left behind. "What…?" Treize began and stopped.

Dorothy saw Treize glance between Zechs and Aleks as the boy came to stand just behind his father. Everyone commented on how much alike father and son looked but Dorothy had never considered just how similar Aleks was to his father at the same age. How must it feel for Treize to be seeing the face of his lover in a stranger he knew only was called Aleks? The younger Peacecraft was a twisted ghost, with his red sweater and amethyst eyes, of a boy Treize had been willing to die to protect and had loved more than anything else in the world. His gaze flicked between the two men again, still trying to understand, and he reached out to the elder without thinking. "Miri?" he asked again, plaintive and pleading for answers to questions Dorothy wasn't sure he knew he was asking.

Zechs hit his hand away with enough force that Treize staggered, his newly found balance vanishing as bewilderment turned to dizziness. "Don't you fucking dare call me that!" he growled, raising a hand.

"Milliardo, stop!" Dorothy cried, steadying Treize as he stumbled into her. "I don't think he's an impostor!" she protested.

"What the hell else could he be?" Zechs snarled at her. "Get away from him!" He reached to pull her away from Treize, and she dug her heels into the smooth floor and set herself defiantly.

"He called me Dors," she spat. "He called you Miri. Who else knew those names?" There was nothing but stony silence in reply and she gestured sharply at the floor and the bloody mess marring it. "That came from him," she told Zechs flatly. "Even if he is a plant, he's hurt, and badly."

"Ask me if I care," Zechs snarled. He glared at Treize again. "What are you, anyway?" he challenged. "Spy? Assassin?"

Treize shook his head. "I don't understand… I'm not…."

"Where are you from?" Zechs demanded.

"I don't know what you mean," the general protested.

"Whose orders are you under? Balliol's? Chen's?"

"I'm not under anyone's orders!"

Zechs shook his head angrily. "Who sent you?" he snarled.

"No-one sent me!"

Dorothy jumped at the words; she'd never heard Treize raise his voice.

There was a moment of silence as Treize coughed, the force of his shout having wrenched both his throat and his lungs. "No-one sent me," he repeated, more quietly. "I don't even know where I am!"

"Sanc," Dorothy said softly. "You're in Sanc. In the Palace."

"So you say," Treize replied and Dorothy cringed at the doubt in his eyes. The steel that had put the world at his feet at the age of twenty-four was coming to the fore now, and his sharply logical mind was rejecting the impossible truth for a far more believable lie. She watched as he squared his shoulders. "The last thing I remember was pressing the self-destruct in the Tallgeese 2," he explained softly. "That was the 24th of December, AC 195."

"We know when it was!" Zechs hissed. "We were there!" He levelled a look at Treize that promised bloody murder. "Unlike you. The pilot of the Tallgeese that day was General Treize Khushrenada. He died when Chang Wufei pierced his suit with his Gundam's beam-trident and ignited the power-pile."

Dorothy felt sudden tremors wrack Treize and realised he was ruthlessly suppressing the urge to laugh. She scowled, recognising it as the first sign of incipient hysteria. Not that she could blame him – the poor boy was not having a good day. "Are we arguing over how I died?" he asked, conversationally, bringing one hand to rest it on his hip. "Or how I tried to die?" he corrected, frowning. "Since Dorothy assures me I'm still alive."

Aleks choked, joining Treize in the laughter-suppressing game. "My God! He sounds just like all the recordings!" he exclaimed.

"I would hope I do," Treize returned softly.

"We're not arguing over anything," Zechs spat, interrupting the exchange. "You'll have to try harder than that if you wish to ruin the reputation of my friend!"

"I have a reputation to ruin?" Treize asked wonderingly and Dorothy winced at his tone. He was playing with them now. Clearly, he'd decided that the whole situation was beyond ridiculous. In his place, she'd have been telling herself that the self-destruct had failed – and wasn't that a frightening bit of information for her to fret about later? – that she'd been captured and that this was all some ruse to extract information. "I was under the impression I shot that completely, for family at least, the night Dors caught us in her father's rose garden."

Dorothy gasped; Zechs paled. "Where did you pick that bit of information up from?" he demanded.

"By being there," Treize replied, shrugging lightly. "You cut your finger trying to hand me a red rose and then insisted that I kiss it better." The look he shot Zechs was coy, taunting, and absolutely fake. "You were still young enough to be… playful," he murmured. "Or, rather, Zechs was."

"Excuse me?" Zechs spluttered. "You doubt who I am?"

"Well, of course I do. Wouldn't you, in my place?" he asked and if Dorothy hadn't been able to feel the way he was shaking and the tension in his muscles, she knew she would have been utterly fooled by his act. It was a beautiful performance. "Milliardo Peacecraft is nineteen years old. Dorothy Catalonia is sixteen." He canted an eyebrow at the younger blond man. "Who are you supposed to be?" he asked lightly.

Aleks started at being addressed directly and then smiled. "I'm supposed to be the Crown Prince of the Sanc Kingdom," he replied, offering Treize a perfect bow. "Aleksander Stephan Peacecraft, General." He grinned at Treize suddenly. "Did Aunt Doro really catch you and my father…?" he quizzed and Dorothy could have kissed him for his attempt to break the tension. He knew nothing about Treize beyond what he'd learned at school and what he'd been told by family, but he'd read the man perfectly and reacted accordingly.

"Aleksander!" Zechs snapped. He shot the younger man a look that promised a world of trouble and turned back to Treize, who was looking at him with a certain amount of fond sadness. Dorothy raised an eyebrow as the expression made him falter and doubt for a moment, then shook her head as he visibly steeled himself. "What?" he snarled.

"Noin's child?" Treize asked softly, forgetting that he was convincing himself it was all a trick.

"Yes, he's Noin's son," Zechs replied coldly.

Treize nodded. "Where is the lovely Lucrezia?" he asked and Dorothy flinched. That was not a question he should have raised at this moment.

"Dead," Zechs said flatly. "Just like Treize. I have that effect on people." He folded his arms and stared. "You're good, I'll give you that, and I'll be thrilled when we learn where your information came from. But you should have followed the trend. Most people stopped using the 'last thing I remember is Tallgeese' ploy decades ago. And most have the sense to send a double of creditable age, and not a boy too young to have been born during the Eve Wars."

Something about Zechs's little speech rattled Treize, making him lose his cool composure. "I'm sorry, what?" he asked, uncertainly.

"How old are you, supposedly, anyway?"

Treize shook his head. "Taking whatever you want me to believe the date is now, or the last date I remember?" he countered, rallying.

"Oh, yours, of course."

Dorothy ran the math in her head swiftly, sighing when she heard his answer before she could figure it out for herself. Had he really been so young?

"In that case," Treize replied, "I'm 24 years, 10 months, 3 weeks and some odd number of days. My Birthday is February 1st."

"Very good," Zechs sneered. "You can count."

"Would I have made it through the Academy if I couldn't?" Treize retorted, beginning to lose his patience. Dorothy could feel the strain he was under. "Certainly I'd have difficulty designing mobile suits!"

Something flashed in Zechs's eyes and he turned to look at Dorothy angrily. "Still think he's the real thing?" he demanded.

"Now, more than ever," she replied. "I can feel it. And so can you!"

"Can I? Shall we find out?" Without warning, Zechs reached out and seized Treize by the arm, dragging him away from Dorothy and across the room they were in. "Treize Khushrenada was a unique individual," he said conversationally, "the whole world knows that. A leader willing to die for his cause. A hero. A martyr. A visionary and a genius. It's in all the textbooks."

He reached the door to the room and hauled Treize through it and down a narrow, beautifully appointed corridor. The grip on he had on the younger man's arm must have hurt. Dorothy pushed herself past her shock and ran after them, having a sudden sinking feeling about where this was going. Treize was struggling but he was tired and hurt and Zechs, now, was four inches taller and probably a fair bit heavier.

At the end of the corridor, Zechs hit the button on a little elevator control panel and turned to look down at Treize as they waited. Running footsteps told Dorothy that Aleks had followed them, too, and she shot him a grateful glance as he drew level.

"Most people, though, don't know just how unique he was," Zechs carried on, his face twisted with something Dorothy didn't want to think about too closely. "Treize created something in the last few months of his life that only four people in the world ever experienced. One of them couldn't make it work, one of them used it only in stripped down form, and one of them it drove mad. Only one man ever used it as it had been intended – it's creator."

Dorothy gasped and reached for Zechs, her expression horrified as she realised what he was about. "Milliardo, no!" she protested. "You can't do this!"

"Why not?" he answered her. "If he is Treize Khushrenada, then there won't be a problem, will there?"

"If he is Treize Khushrenada," she countered frantically, "then he's just been through the explosion of his mobile suit and God only knows what else! He was vomiting blood on your floor half an hour ago! You'll kill him!"

"Possibly. But then, he isn't Treize."

Aleks was frowning deeply. "Father, whatever you're thinking of, I'm not sure you should…"

Zechs turned on him, eyes flashing. "I am." He turned his gaze back to Treize, who was still struggling futilely. "It took me years to work out why that was. The answer came to me last year, when one small boy did something I'd only ever seen one other person do before. Treize Khushrenada was unique. He had talents that no-one, not even I, his supposed closest friend, his lover, knew he had."

Dorothy watched Treize pale as the lift arrived and Zechs dragged him into it. She followed, her eyes flicking between the two men frantically as she calculated.

"Did you know Treize dabbled with psycho-active drugs?" Zechs asked softly and she saw Treize flinch in acknowledgement. "No? Not many people did. He played with them for years. Different drugs, different mixes, different strengths. Some of the best nights of my life came from him when he hit a combination that worked. Some of the worst, when he hit one that re-bounded on him. Eventually he gave up on drugs and turned to technology."

Dorothy forced herself past the surprise and curiosity rising in herself and glared at her friend. "You are not doing this, Milliardo," she insisted.

When she was met with a blank stare, she turned to the younger Peacecraft. "Aleks, when this lift stops I want you to run and get Heero and your Uncle Quatre. Somebody needs to talk some sense into your Father!" He nodded and she offered him a reassuring smile. All of this must be almost as bewildering to him as it was for Treize.

Zechs ignored the two of them completely. "Treize saw things; flashes, glimpses, snippets. If he concentrated, he could touch people and know what they would do next; touch objects and know what would happen to them in the end. Sometimes, with help, he saw more than one thing, one person. But he wasn't strong enough alone."

The lift door opened and Zechs stalked into a darkened workshop, pulling Treize with him. Dorothy noted that the redhead had stopped struggling and she hoped he'd worked out what was coming – for his sake.

"Lights!" Zechs snapped. "When the drugs weren't enough, he built himself something else. And when he was done with it, the bastard gave it to me."

Treize flinched again at that, and then Dorothy saw his eyes flick around the room. He froze at what he must have seen – standing in an alcove, illuminated by the lights much as it had been in his house in Luxembourg, was the remains of the Epyon suit. "No," he breathed.

"That monster has a lot to answer for," Zechs snarled. "The man who created it, even more." He tightened his grip and leant down. "If you are Treize Khushrenada, as Doro obviously believes, then you're the only person in the world who can get into that suit and not be driven mad, so I think we should try it and find out. If you're sane when the program shuts down, I'll believe you are whom you say you are and we can talk about what you were thinking. If you aren't Treize, then you won't be talking to anyone, ever again, most likely."

Dorothy caught Zechs's arm and dug her sharp nails in hard. "You are not doing this!" she insisted, looking across at the younger man. "Look at him! Doesn't his reaction tell you what you need to know?" Treize was staring across at the suit in obvious horror, clearly frightened half out of his mind. "There are other ways; better ways!"

"None nearly as conclusive," Zechs answered shortly. "None that will give us an answer in less than ten minutes."

"You cannot do this, Milliardo!" Dorothy repeated, but she knew there was little else she could do to stop him.

"Yes, I can," Zechs replied coldly. "And I'm going to. One way or another, he deserves it."

"Miri, no," Treize begged suddenly, still looking at the suit. "You don't understand…"

"I understand perfectly."

"No, you don't! Epyon worked for me, but it showed me everything! I can't use it again. I can't! Why do you think I gave it to you?"

Zechs looked at him mercilessly. "You can tell me that when you come out of the suit." He hauled on the arm he still had hold of and dragged Treize across to the suit, catching hold of the hoist line and letting it take both of them up. Treize fought, but within seconds, he was forced to grab onto his friend for fear of falling to the concrete floor below. Dorothy watched, helpless and praying Aleks would be swift in his running for help, as Zechs stepped off onto the hatch platform and threw Treize into the damaged pilot's seat.

"Miri, please. Please, don't do this!"

"Shut up!" The taller man hit a button on the console and stepped back as the suit began to activate.

As he caught the hoist line and disappeared, the Epyon system came to life and caught Treize in its grip.


	3. Chapter 3

Dorothy flew at Zechs the moment his feet touched the concrete again. "Milliardo, stop this at once!" she ordered.

Zechs stared at her wearily. "It's a low-power test, that's all," he explained quietly. "It'll frighten the shit out of the little bastard and that will be that. I'm tired of this game. How many fake Treize's do I have to see?" He smiled at her, noting that she was still at her most beautiful when her blood was up. "I can't believe you thought I was really going to put him through the full programme! You should know better, Doro."

He was utterly unprepared for the stinging slap that caught him across the face, her nails raking through his skin on the end of it.

"This one isn't a fake!" Dorothy exploded. "I don't know how and I don't know why. I don't even know how I know, but that man is Treize Khushrenada!"

Zechs folded his arms across his chest and gazed down at her levelly. "He's good, Doro, I agree. He's probably the best we've ever seen. He had me fooled for few seconds too, but we both know there is no possible way for that to be Treize. Treize died in the Tallgeese."

"No-one ever proved that," Dorothy pointed out. "There was no body."

"There was no suit!" Zechs spluttered. "The bloody thing vaporised completely. Poof! Gone! Space dust and atoms! I looked, Doro. I read every report on the area I could. Nothing! Not even the black box survived."

Doro shook her head stubbornly. "Absence of a thing proves nothing. Without Treize's body you cannot prove that man in the Epyon isn't him!"

"Of course I can prove it isn't him!" Zechs choked. "Doro, for God's sake, have you heard yourself?"

Dorothy shrugged, looking up at her friend with pleading eyes. "I know I sound crazy. Believe me, I do. I just… I know it's impossible but something inside me insists that man is Treize. He looks just like him, Milliardo. He sounds just like him. Even the cloth of his uniform is right!"

"Yes, he looks just like him. He sounds just like him. His uniform is right. What does that prove except they had a good surgeon, a good acting coach and they robbed a museum! If he were alive, Treize would be forty-nine now! That man can't be more than twenty-five, if that!"

"Twenty four years, ten months, three weeks and some odd days. You heard him say it, just like I did."

Zechs gestured wildly. "Dorothy! That cannot be Treize! However much you want to wish it, he did not get magically transported from the Tallgeese to my morning room!"

"Why not?" Dorothy demanded. "Why couldn't he have been? Is it really so impossible? You said at the time you thought it was odd that the searches of the explosion site found no organic residue!"

Zechs paled and closed his eyes. "I was desperate when I said that. Desperate to believe he was still out there somewhere. Why are you doing this to me, Doro?" he asked softly. "Treize is gone; his body reduced down to sub-atomics so fine there was nothing left of him at all but an empty grave. He's dead. He's been dead for quarter of a century!"

"How did he know our nicknames?" Dorothy asked stubbornly. "How did he know about the night in the rose garden?"

"I don't know!" Zechs exploded. "Maybe Treize left a diary we missed!"

"You know that isn't true," Dorothy said quietly. "It's impossible. If there was that kind of information out there, we'd have heard about it before now."

"It's a lot more fucking possible than Treize jumping twenty-five years into the future at the very moment of his death!"

Dorothy had to concede that point. "Granted," she admitted, sighing.

"Thank you!"

She stared at the floor for a moment and then looked up at Zechs with a determined glint in her eyes. "So, then, just what were the odds of the Tallgeese explosion not leaving any organic matter behind at all?" she asked.

Zechs growled at her wordlessly.

"Well?" she insisted.

The lift doors opened behind her, saving her from whatever furious answer Zechs had been going to give her.

"Well, I have to admit I was expecting more blood," Quatre said calmly as he stepped into the workshop. "Does one of you want to explain why my nephew just came to me with tales of fake-Treize's-who-might-not-be and his father having lost the plot?"

"We had an intruder," Zechs answered shortly. "He claimed to be Treize. He was very convincing. He is not Treize. I dumped him in Epyon to teach him a lesson." Quatre's eyes widened in shock and Zechs sighed tiredly. "And clearly all my friends and family think I'm psychotic. It's running a low-power test cycle, that's all. I'm aiming to scare the hell out of the brat, in the hopes that no one will try this again. The only person who'd actually be in any danger would be Treize."

Quatre raised an eyebrow. "Interesting idea, certainly. You do know he'll probably go straight to the press?"

"Do I care?" Zechs wondered aloud.

Quatre chuckled. "I suspect not. The headlines should be interesting: 'Mad King Milliardo Threatens Innocent Intruder with Illegal War Machine!' Relena is going to kill you."

"I count on you to keep me safe," Zechs returned, cracking a weak smile. "Why do you think I let you marry her?"

Quatre had whatever answer he was going to give cut off by Dorothy grabbing his arm. "Stop the test!" she pleaded.

"Hmm? Why? I know you have bad memories of Epyon, Dorothy, but really, a test-cycle is harmless unless you've been in the suit at full power. Milliardo was right; the intruder would only be in any danger if he really were Khushrenada. Oh, or you, or Milliardo, or Heero, of course. Since he's none of the four of you, the worst he'll suffer is a bit of a headache and a few strange dreams."

"But he is Treize!"

Quatre blinked. "Dorothy, Khushrenada is dead. Isn't he?" he asked, looking up at Zechs in confusion.

The taller blond nodded. "Yes! Yes, Treize is dead!"

"No, he is not!" Dorothy objected. "I know it's impossible, I know it's crazy but that man is Treize. And every minute he's in that suit is a minute that could kill him! Please, Quatre, make him stop the test!"

The Arabian stared down at the blonde woman and felt shock roil through him when he saw there were tears in her eyes. "Doro?" he asked softly, then looked back at his brother-in-law. "Milliardo? Is there any chance that…?"

"No!"

"All right. You won't mind if I abort the cycle anyway? She seems bothered by it and, really, I think a simple DNA test would be better way of authenticating the man's identity in any case."

Zechs shrugged roughly. "Do whatever the hell you like."

Dorothy was across the room to the master control panel in a heartbeat, bringing up the interface and the activity monitors. She bit off a gasp as she read the displays and began hitting the buttons with alarming speed. "I told you!" she flung at Zechs. "I told you and you wouldn't listen to me!"

Zechs closed his eyes. "Stop it, Dorothy," he warned. "Stop it, stop it, stop it! This is not funny!"

Quatre looked between the two of them, and then at the monitors. His cry of horror made Zechs snap his eyes open in alarm. "Allah!" Quatre exclaimed. "Are you sure you set it for a test-cycle only?"

Zechs tensed. "Of course!"

"There's active data streaming though the system!"

The words hit Zechs like a lead weight to the stomach. "Impossible!" he breathed. "Impossible!"

"Not if the pilot has previous system exposure," Quatre countered grimly. "We know that from testing with you." He shook his head. "Is it at all possible that your impostor, isn't?" he asked, as gently as he could under the circumstances.

The lift doors opened again, revealing Heero, and, behind him, Relena and a wary looking Aleks. The former pilot was across the workshop the moment he read the set of his colleague's shoulders, leaving Relena and Aleks to trail him more slowly.

"Treize is dead!" Zechs insisted wildly.

Heero took one look at the monitor's and shook his head. "Not according to Epyon, he isn't. The wave pattern on the data-stream is a hair from perfect." He shot the older man one assessing look and frowned. "Our simulations suggested only Khushrenada could generate data within the 90% mark."

Zechs buried his face in his hands and shook his head. "It can't be!" he moaned.

Quatre raised an eyebrow from where he was working to shut the system down as gently as he could. "There's an old axiom: When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth. It is impossible for anyone other than Khushrenada to generate this data; therefore the man in the suit is Khushrenada."

"Or, in other words," Aleks broke in, from where he was standing next to his Aunt, "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck and in all other ways is convincingly duck-ish, then it's a damned duck, and it isn't necessary to shoot it, roast it and eat it to prove it."

Quatre couldn't help the chuckle that bubbled from him. "You're spending too much time with Duo," he murmured.

"It seemed an appropriate analogy," Aleks replied, unapologetically. "He looked like a Treize, he walked like a Treize, he talked like a Treize. In all aspects, the poor man was compellingly Treize-ian, but there's my father, letting a little thing like apparent fact become a gun."

"That's enough, Aleks," Heero chided. He shot Zechs another glance and then looked back at the teenager. "Why don't you take the ladies back upstairs and call Sally Po for us?"

Aleks shrugged but did as he was told without murmur, although Relena insisted on staying and he ended up escorting only Dorothy, who was looking increasingly close to a full-blown bout of hysterics.

"This is all going to be frighteningly funny someday, isn't it?" Heero asked, as Aleks all but picked the woman up to get her into the lift.

"Probably," Quatre agreed, watching Relena as she went to her brother and put her arms around him when the man began to shiver visibly. "We have a King coming unstuck because his dead lover may be being driven mad by a mobile suit. A Duchess half-hysterical and accusing the King of attempted murder. Two Gundam pilots actively trying to help their former enemy. And off to one side, unconcerned by it all, there's the King's son, making duck analogies, courtesy of the Duchess's husband. Why did you have Aleks call Sally anyway? She can't do a thing for system-shock."

"I wanted to give him something that would keep him occupied. He doesn't need to be here if Zechs really cracks and he doesn't need to see what Epyon really does to a person. I got him to call Sally because, at the very least, she can run a DNA test on this supposed Khushrenada." Heero shrugged as the two of them worked side by side to bring the system into the last stages of shutdown. "It's possible the man will have other injuries that need medical care, too. If he really has jumped straight from the last battle of 195, then it's likely, given how Tallgeese went out. Aleks said he was vomiting blood when he first got here, which is damning enough on its own. I was also considering that we might need her for Zechs."

Quatre nodded, taking a step back as the suit shut off, exchanging glances with Heero as the hiss of the hatch reached Zechs's sensitive ears and the man took off running across the hanger flat out.

The other pilot's expression was grim as he shrugged and went after their friend.

Zechs stopped at the foot of the Epyon suit, the two Gundam pilots right behind him and Relena hot on their heels, all of them looking up as a slender, shaking figure stepped from the hatch. He wavered in place for a moment, repeating the trademark hand-to-eyes gesture that had been so convincing for Dorothy, and then caught the hoist line Zechs had already sent up for him.

He rode it to the floor, giving the waiting party a good look at his battered, bloodstained uniform and too-familiar facial features, and Quatre registered his wife's stunned gasp and Heero's surprised grunt as echoes of his own shock. He stepped forward to meet the man as his boots met the rough concrete floor, but the general ignored them all in favour of looking at Zechs steadily

That he was holding himself upright through sheer force of will was obvious, but that did nothing to ease the unbelievable strangeness of looking – for the first time and twenty five years after the man had died and been buried! – directly at someone who had once been Quatre's greatest enemy.

The silence dragged on as Zechs and Treize stared at each other; Zechs with eyes dilated by shock, Treize, exhausted and defiant. "Do you believe me, now, Miri?" the general asked eventually, his voice a ragged whisper. Quatre didn't want to imagine what must have happened to make it sound that way.

"Yes," Zechs answered him softly, hearing the soft, rolling accent under the stress. "Yes, I believe you." He took a step forward and reached out with hands that were trembling. "Treize…" he murmured, lifting hesitant fingers to brush across the redhead's face.

Treize smiled wearily. "That's good," he answered, and collapsed into his former lover's arms.


	4. Chapter 4

Treize woke slowly to soft, yielding warmth and bright sunshine, his eyes fluttering open as he registered the scent of red roses and strong coffee. It took him a moment to work out that he was in a bed somewhere, but it wasn't his bed – any of them – comfortable as it was, and it wasn't a room that he recognised at all.

Frowning as he fought to recall what had happened to him last, he dug one hand from the mass of covers he was buried under, scowling at the deep green silk sleeve covering his arm. He was positive that he owned nothing that colour – certainly not pyjamas! – and he had the distinct feeling that the last thing he'd been wearing was his uniform. Brushing his tumbled hair back from his face, he pushed himself to sit up, wincing at the taste in his mouth that told him it had been far too long since he last brushed his teeth, and froze as sudden movement off to one side told him there was someone else in the room.

"You might want to take it slowly," that someone said quietly. "You've been out cold for three days; you're bound to be a little achy."

Treize had already noticed that. He nodded carefully, then looked up in shock. "Zechs?" he asked, as the voice registered with him properly.

A tall, blond man came and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at him warily. "Most people call me Milliardo these days," he said, "but yes. How much do you remember?" he asked gently.

Treize had to remind himself forcefully that staring was rude. He made himself look down at the bedding under his hands and shook his head. "I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm sorry," he added, without knowing quite why.

The man calling himself Zechs chuckled. "Don't apologise. There's a fair possibility that you've had the worst few days in the history of the world," he explained dryly. "It's not a surprise that your head is a bit scattered. Sally warned us you might have a little trouble, but she promises it'll all come back to you shortly."

Treize nodded, forbearing from asking who 'Sally' was. There were other, more important questions to be asked first. "Where am I?" he enquired softly.

"The Royal Palace, Newport City, Sanc."

"Sanc?" Treize asked, shocked.

"Yes." The man smiled at Treize again, the expression still gentle. "I know that's not an answer you were expecting, but it is the truth and there is an explanation, I promise."

Treize raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure it will prove fascinating," he allowed.

"Fantastic, perhaps," the other man laughed. "Do you want to get into it now, or would you rather save it until you've had a chance to get yourself together a little? It might take better after a hot bath and a decent breakfast," he offered.

"I…yes, maybe. Thank you." Treize pushed himself to sit up more. "May I ask what time it is?"

"Currently? Just shy of eight in the morning. Your watch is on the dressing table if you want to check for yourself. It's been set to the local time."

"Thank you," Treize said again and opened his mouth to say something else. He closed it again as he realised he didn't have the first idea about where to start with everything that was spinning around in his head.

The blond man was looking at him with something akin to sympathy in his eyes. "You should feel free to ask, you know," he reassured. "I know this must all seem very strange to you right now."

Treize looked up at him for a moment, shrugging helplessly. "In that case, forgive me," he said softly, "but… who _are_ you?"

The man's eyes widened slightly and then closed sadly. "I should have known you'd ask that," he murmured, taking a deep breath. "As hard as it may be for you to believe, because I know I've changed, I _am_ Milliardo Peacecraft. I was born here, in Sanc, on the 5th of November, AC 175 and I've known you since I was three years old and you were seven." He tilted his head to one side, making the long tail his hair was gathered back into fall over one shoulder. "The very first time we met," he added, seeing the other man looking unconvinced, "I fell asleep sitting on your knee because you'd worn me out chasing me all over the Palace whilst we played hide and seek."

Treize knew his surprise must be written all over his face but he couldn't make himself care overmuch. "But if you're…Milliardo… then…."

Zechs held up a hand before Treize could find a way to phrase what he wanted to ask next and cut him off. "Bath and breakfast?" he reminded gently. "I promise I'll explain later."

He waited for Treize to nod slowly and then stood up and took a step back from the bed, giving his friend room to get up. "The bathroom is through that door there," he said, pointing across the room. "There should be soap and shampoo and razors and the like already in there but feel free to ring my staff and ask if you need anything. Just pick up the phone next to you and it will connect directly."

Zechs paused to draw a breath, and to give the younger man a moment to indicate that he'd understood, and then continued, "I've put clothes in the wardrobe for you. They should fit you reasonably well but we can go shopping later this afternoon, if you feel up to it. I'll leave the coffee for you. It's a fresh pot and it's still hot. Do you want me to send someone up to draw you a bath?" he asked.

Treize shook his head immediately. "No, I'll manage. I'd rather be alone for a few minutes, I think," he admitted.

"All right." Zechs smiled again and took another step back. "I'll leave you be, then. You're in the West Wing now and I'll be downstairs in the small breakfast room. Can you remember the way?"

Treize thought for moment, recalling memories fifteen years old. "Yes, I think I can," he said eventually.

"Good," Zechs told him. "There'll be people about if you can't, in any case. Take your time."

"Thank you." Treize pushed himself out of bed as Zechs turned for the door, putting put his feet on the carpeted floor just as the blond paused in the doorway and glanced back. The look on the blonde's face was elated, happier than Treize could ever remember from his friend, and it made him smile in return involuntarily. "What?" he asked lightly, curious and a little wary.

Zechs simply looked at him for a moment more, then shook his head. "Nothing at all," he replied. "I'm simply unbelievably glad to have you back with us."

Treize raised an eyebrow and Zechs began laughing as he stepped into corridor and closed the door behind him.

* * *

Treize stayed sitting on the edge of the bed for a few seconds after the other man had left, his mind a blank, and then he got to his feet and crossed the room to the coffee pot. He poured himself a cup, noting that it was as hot and fresh as he'd been promised and sipped it, taking it with him into the bathroom.

He smiled at the size and the depth of the tub that met his eyes and put his cup down on the counter beside the sink as he bent to put the plug in the drain. It took him a moment to puzzle out the working of the taps but soon enough there was a torrent of hot water pouring into the bath, sending clouds of steam to fog up the room and raise the temperature enough that Treize was completely comfortable when he stripped off the borrowed pyjamas and folded them onto the counter next to his coffee.

The sound and sight of the water reminded his body that there were side effects, other than stiff muscles, of sleeping for three days without moving and he spent a minute or two sighing in considerable relief before moving to the sink, washing his hands, and opening the mirrored cabinet above it to hunt for the promised toiletries.

The sight that met his eyes had him laughing aloud. The cabinet was filled with everything he could ever imagine a guest needing and then some. In a quick glance, he'd counted five different types of soap, six shower gels, four bottles of shampoo and conditioner, three different makes of razor, one of them an old-fashioned straight-blade – complete with all the accompanying palaver – and two types of shaving foam.

Looking more closely, he saw several different colognes, various types of moisturiser, a multitude of hair-care products – gels, mousses, brushes and combs, what looked like a full manicure kit and, seemingly, the entire contents of a very well stocked pharmacy.

There were more lotions, potions, pills and packets than Treize could even begin to imagine needing, some of them remedies for things he couldn't recall ever hearing of, but it was his last discovery that made him snort in amused surprise and raise an eyebrow. Tucked discreetly away in a little box at the very back of the cabinet were a dozen items of a more distinctly personal nature, including four different makes of lube, three fits of condom, two packets of tissues specifically designed for the purpose of cleaning up after certain activities, and even a small bottle of one of the milder – and more legal – chemical stimulants.

The whole thing had Treize laughing madly. What on Earth had Zechs imagined Treize would possibly need to call the house staff for with all this lot to hand?

The former general leaned over to switch the water off as the tub filled to just under the overflow and shook his head. Either Zechs was an obsessively attentive host, or he'd been desperately trying to make sure Treize had anything and everything he could possibly need. Whichever was the case, he'd managed to go completely over the top in his efforts, but it was sweet, in a way, and rather typical.

Shaking his head, Treize shoved most of the morass back into the cabinet, selecting a single choice of each of the items he thought he'd need. He quickly discovered that whilst most of the toiletry brand names were familiar – things he'd either used or had heard about for years – with only one or two exceptions, the exact packaging and formulation of them wasn't. It made him frown as he brushed and flossed his teeth and then applied a layer of soap to the unsightly ginger stubble covering his jaw.

Wiping off the steamed-up mirror with one hand, he picked up the straight-blade razor with the other and set it to his skin. The flash of light off the razor reflected in the glass made Treize freeze and he dropped the blade in the sink with a clatter as he went suddenly dizzy.

He bent forward, gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, the porcelain cold and hard under his skin, and closed his eyes as a flood of images washed over him – faces, places and events he either didn't know or only dimly recalled, all ending in glaring whiteness as he was surrounded by an explosion.

He heaved for air as his body shuddered, a chill sweat breaking across his skin. A headache bloomed – swift, vicious and tight – across his temples and every muscle in his body began to throb as though he'd been beaten black and blue. The memory of Tallgeese, of pushing the self-destruct, came back to him in a rush and he cried out in shock and horror.

It faded away slowly, leaving him shaking and cold and staring at his reflection in the mirror as though he didn't recognise himself. As, perhaps, he didn't, he realised. There was no way he should have survived that explosion – he hadn't been intending to survive, he knew now – so how had he ended up here, in a bathroom, in what must be a restored Sanc Kingdom, with a Zechs who looked years older than the one in his memories?

Picking up the razor again, he shaved the stubble from his face and rinsed the remains of the soap away quickly, and then leaned forward and stared at himself closely, looking for changes.

There were none.

He could clearly recall, now, standing in front of another mirror, in what he thought were his quarters on the resource satellite he had chosen to use as his base for his last assault, his uniform perfect on his body and resigned determination glinting in his eyes as he steeled himself to face what he knew would be his death.

It felt like a recent memory – days old, at best – and if one allowed for the state of his hair and his skin, then he looked no different. Zechs had said he'd been out cold for three days and whilst Treize could make that square in his head with his own memories and with his appearance, he couldn't make it work with his location and with the changes in his closest friend.

How had he survived Tallgeese's destruction? How was he not at least injured in some way? And how had he gotten from a ruined mobile suit in Space to a bathroom in the Sanc Palace?

He closed his eyes again, fighting another wave of light-headedness by taking slow, deep breaths, and then told himself it was caused by low blood sugar from not eating – and not by the insidious whispering ticking at the edges of his mind – as he opened the cabinet again and shook out two of the pills from one the bottles of over-the-counter painkillers. He downed them with a mouthful of his cooling coffee to combat the way he was aching and then made himself step into the hot water of the bath and relax.

Zechs had promised to explain. Treize could make himself wait until he was presentable again to ask him to.


	5. Chapter 5

Zechs was sitting at one end of a small table when Treize stepped into the private dining room, a half-eaten slice of toast in one hand as he perused a newspaper spread open on the table in front of him. He looked up almost immediately and smiled warmly, gesturing to the seat next to him as he snapped the paper closed and pressed a little bell set into the surface of the table.

Treize seated himself as gracefully as he could manage and raised one eyebrow questioningly when Zechs simply looked at him for a few moments.

"Those clothes fit you better than I hoped they would," the blond commented offhandedly, turning over a clean cup from the tray in front of the chair on his other side and pouring steaming coffee into it from a pot.

Treize took the cup as he was offered it and put it down in front of him to look down at the sweater and casual slacks he was wearing. There was nothing wrong with the trousers, though they were a little big for him all over, but he wasn't convinced about the forest green colour of the jumper.

His expression must have said as much, because Zechs began to chuckle softly. "What is it about you and green?" he asked. "You always hated it and I never knew why. It suits you!"

"It doesn't," Treize answered him shortly. "It clashes with my hair and makes me look like an extra from a pantomime."

Zechs folded his hands together in front of his face and then propped his chin on them. "It makes you look slightly elfin, yes, but that's no bad thing. Is the sweater comfortable, at least?"

Treize shrugged. "Reasonably, yes. Who should I thank for the loan?"

Zechs smiled a little. "Me, for the sweater. Dorothy's son, Felix, for the trousers and the shoes. I promise you everything else is new," he added, before Treize could open his mouth to ask. "I asked one of the valets to run into the city yesterday to pick up a few things. I'd have had him buy you more but I wasn't sure of the fit and I thought you'd prefer to choose your own things."

"I would, thank you." Treize sipped his coffee thoughtfully for a moment, then looked at the other man with a curious and impish expression. "Is that where the contents of my bathroom cabinet came from as well? The valet's trip to pick up 'a few things'?"

Zechs shrugged. "In part," he admitted. "Some of that is standard for all the guest rooms here. I just asked the man to add the things I remembered you using specifically, that's all. Did you find everything you needed?"

"You really thought I wouldn't?" Treize wondered.

"You were fussy about such things," Zechs replied calmly. He paused for a moment as he bit into his abandoned toast, chewed and swallowed. "I'm sorry if I overdid it a little," he apologised quietly. "There were some things I wasn't quite sure about, things I remembered you using more than one sort of at various times. I couldn't remember properly which you were using when…." He stopped and swallowed, then shook his head and continued, "Well, I couldn't remember, so I asked the valet to get the lot. I wanted some things to be familiar for you, at least."

"And I appreciate the thought, but five types of soap?" Treize asked, watching with something akin to delight as Zechs coloured a little. "And dare I ask about that little box at the back? Please tell me you didn't send the valet for that!"

The colouring deepened. "Ah, no," Zechs answered awkwardly. "That was partly a standard thing. The rest I added myself. I thought…." He stopped again, biting his lip, then shrugged and smiled ruefully. "Actually, I haven't the faintest idea what I was thinking. I suspect I was operating on some sort of auto-pilot and trying to match your old bathroom cupboard as closely as I could in the time I had."

The way Zechs was blushing at himself was charming. "Zechs," Treize teased gently. "When have I ever kept four sorts of lube in my bathroom?"

"I saw you use all four of those at one time or another!" Zechs shot back. "I told you, I was making sure that…."

"Oh, yes? And just who are you expecting me to use them with?"

The moment he said it, Treize knew it was a mistake. Somehow, despite all the reasons why it shouldn't have been the case, he'd slipped into talking to this Zechs as he had always talked to his friend – a peculiar and unique form of teasing and, in the years since Zechs had been old enough for it, flirtatious banter.

The blond man went completely still for a fraction of a second, then looked away. "Whomever you like, I suppose," he answered eventually. "As always."

There was a bitterness to Zechs's tone that took Treize aback a little, and reminded him sharply just how much there was of his surroundings at the moment that he didn't understand. It wasn't that he'd never heard Zechs speak in that tone before – he'd had plenty to be bitter about, after all – but it had never been directed at Treize personally, and there'd never been quite that level of icy venom behind it.

Zechs's facial expression had changed, as well, closing and becoming cold. It highlighted every single difference between this man and the one Treize knew, until the general felt as though he were sharing the table with a complete stranger. It shook him and he suspected it showed, because Zechs took one look at his face and stood up abruptly.

"Excuse me," the blond bit off. "I'm going to see what's keeping your breakfast." He pushed back from the table and strode off towards the door on long legs.

Treize watched him go, listening as his footsteps began to fade away. Unconsciously, he wrapped his hands around his coffee-cup, letting the heat of it soak into his skin as he stared blindly across the room. He felt lost and rather disorientated all of a sudden.

There was a murmur of voices from the hallway beyond the door and then the appearance of another figure in the room, unfolding from the shadows in a way that spoke of long practice and not a little natural talent.

"Good morning, people," the new arrival – a slender man on the short side, perhaps a few years younger than Zechs – greeted the room at large, before he stopped and blinked at Treize directly. "Well, hey!" he exclaimed, immediately beginning to move in the direction of the table. "You're awake!"

Treize nodded slowly. "Ah, yes. I appear to be."

"That's great! I was wondering when you were gonna stir yourself." The man leaned across the table and offered Treize a surprisingly strong and work-hardened hand.

As he moved, a thick, chestnut braid of hair slipped into view and made Treize take another look at him. That hair was familiar from somewhere….

"I'm Duo Maxwell," the man offered, as Treize took his hand.

"Treize Khushrenada," Treize replied automatically, as the light dawned and the man's identity became clear.

Duo laughed. "I know who you are, general!" He plonked himself down in the chair Zechs had vacated and leaned his chin on one hand, grinning. "So, what'd you say to step on Big Blondie's tail, then?"

Treize blinked at that. "Who?"

"His Most Serene Majesty, King Peacecraft," Duo replied. "He sure as hell didn't look serene walking out of here a minute ago!"

Treize felt the sense of disorientation wash over him again. "King Peacecraft… Do you mean Zechs?" he asked helplessly and watched Duo's face take on an almost-comical expression of surprise.

"Zechs? You still call him that?" He shook his head. "Yeah, I guess you would, at that." He grinned. "Yes, I meant Zechs. You heard of any other Peacecraft Monarchs recently?"

"One or two," Treize answered dryly, tightening his grip on his coffee cup. He was strongly beginning to wish he'd demanded that explanation from Zechs before he ever got out of bed. The whole morning was starting to take on an air of unreality that left him wanting to go back to sleep just so he could wake up from his dreaming.

There was a moment of silence and then a warm hand came to rest on Treize's shoulder. "You okay, there?" Duo asked quietly. "I'm guessing you didn't know about the whole 'King Peacecraft' thing, did you?"

Treize simply shook his head. "The last King Peacecraft I'm aware of was Zechs's father, King Stephan. I know Relena acted as Queen for a time, but Zechs has always sworn he couldn't take the crown."

"Right. That makes sense." Duo nodded. "Well, it wasn't easy convincing him, no, but it was best for Sanc. And for Aleks, of course. Ah…" Duo shot Treize another worried look. "You do know who Aleks is, right?"

Treize opened his mouth to say no, and another flash of memory assaulted him as the one in the bathroom had.

From somewhere, the image of a young man came to him, bowing to him and grinning. _"I'm supposed to be the Crown Prince of the Sanc Kingdom, Aleksander Stephan Peacecraft,"_ the boy said and Treize heard his own voice asking if the youth was Noin's son.

He heard Zechs give him an affirmative answer and then he lost the flash of memory as someone began shaking him roughly and calling his name.

Treize shook his head to try to clear it and found himself looking straight up at Duo, who was leaning over him, gazing down at him worriedly. "You back with me, general?" the older man asked. "You kinda zoned out there for a moment."

"I'm fine," Treize told him quietly and saw relief flare in the other man's unusual violet eyes.

"Good," Duo replied. "Because I wasn't looking forward to explaining to Blondie that I broke his friend!"

The sheer irreverence in Duo's voice made Treize smile a little. "I'm not altogether convinced that he would care right now," he admitted. "I'm afraid I may have said something to upset him."

Duo grinned at him, clearly hoping to lighten the mood a tad. Treize rather had the sense that this man spent an awful lot of his time playing court-jester for a set of friends who often needed a little light relief.

He could also see a certain adopted resemblance between the over-bright, encouraging expression on Duo's face now and the one Zechs's son – a thought that stuttered in Treize's mind for a moment before he could make himself accept it – had worn in the flash of memory. He wondered which of them had borrowed it off the other first.

"He'd care, trust me," Duo told him, letting the blinding smile fade a little to something that looked far more natural. "Upset or not. Just ignore him, if you can. He's been up and down all over the place the last couple of days. It's taken all five of us to keep him from driving the staff to murder."

Treize raised an eyebrow. "All five of you?" he asked.

"Not counting the kids of course," Duo qualified, "yeah." He shrugged casually, then looked up, saw that Treize didn't have a clue as to what he was on about and shrugged again, conveying rueful apology as he added, "Me and Doro, Quatre and Relena and Heero."

"Relena would be Relena Peacecraft? Zechs's sister?" Treize asked, hungry for any scraps of information he could get. "And Heero is Heero Yuy, the pilot?"

Duo nodded. "Yeah."

Well, that was nicely confusing, right there. What on Earth was Zechs doing with a houseful of Gundam Pilots, half of whom seemed to be his friends? The last of Treize's memories suggested that Heero and Zechs – at the very least – had been more enemies and rivals than anything else. It was one more bewildering occurrence in a world that was very rapidly becoming nothing but. It left Treize off-balance; feeling as though he'd just stepped on-stage in the middle of a play he'd never seen a script for, and that was not a feeling he liked at all.

"Would it be too much to hope that by 'Doro' you mean Dorothy Catalonia, my niece?" he asked, hating how tentative he sounded. The possibility eased something inside him, because he was sure that having family near at hand would be a great help – Dorothy would certainly tell him what was happening – but balanced against that hope was the notion that Duo could be referring to someone else entirely, a complete stranger Treize had never even heard of. The general wasn't sure he could deal with that idea – Zechs had no acquaintances that Treize hadn't met at least once and certainly no friends close enough to be living with him. The implications of such a thing were staggering.

Duo shot him a confused look as he sank back into his chair, clearly not happy with the expression Treize was sure was on his face. "General," he asked gently, "how much do you remember about how you got here?"

"Nothing," Treize confessed. "As far as I can tell, my last memory is of Tallgeese. After that, nothing – until I woke this morning. Why?"

Duo nodded, biting his lip briefly. "Okay. Just wondering," he murmured. He leaned back in the chair and gazed at Treize levelly. "You met Doro when you first got here," he said slowly. "At the same time as you met Aleks, actually. It's odd you remember one of them, and not the other." He put his head on one side. "And, for the record, she's not Catalonia anymore, she's Maxwell," he finished.

Treize blinked at that, acknowledging it as yet-another bit of information that he couldn't reconcile with the world he knew. "You're married?" he asked, wanting confirmation. He was beginning to draw conclusions that were setting off all sorts of alarm bells in his head.

"Yes," the other man said. "For twen…."

Duo stopped mid-word, shaking his head as Treize raised a curious eyebrow, wondering what he'd been about to say. "Never mind that now," Duo continued, a heartbeat later. "Yes, we're married. I'd have asked your permission but you weren't precisely available at the time," he added, moving to tease and lighten the mood again.

Treize raised the other eyebrow to match the first, letting his eyes say that he knew what his companion was about. "Dors didn't need my permission," he replied, going along with the banter. "Or anyone else's, for that matter. I strongly suspect she would have castrated you for the insult if you had asked me."

"Ah, probably true," Duo admitted, wincing a little. He smiled. "Did Zechs mention it's our son Felix's clothes he borrowed for you, then?" he asked.

Treize nodded. "Now that you mention it, yes, he did." The bubbling suspicions at the back of his mind became another step closer to being real as the former general looked down at himself again for a moment, staring at the clothes he was wearing. Logic began to point out some very uncomfortable facts, and Treize lifted his head again as his breath caught in his lungs from the unexpected distress. "Duo," he started softly, hoping to catch the other man off guard. "How old is Felix?"

"Twenty two," Duo answered, as automatically as Treize could have wanted him to. His eyes widened the second he said it, snapping up to look at the general in alarm.

Treize, for his part, returned the look levelly, ignoring the sensation of the blood draining from his face and the way he suddenly felt a little sick. "Twenty two," he repeated softly. "How long have I been… asleep?"

"Three days," Duo answered quietly. "You've been unconscious since you passed out in the basement workshop three days ago."

Treize shook his head. "Do you need me to tell you that doesn't add up?" he demanded, his voice sharp. "How can you look as you do when you claim I've only been asleep for three days? How can you and my niece be married and have a son of twenty-two?" He heard the rising hysteria in the way he was speaking and swallowed hard to counter it. "I look exactly as I did an hour before I climbed into the Tallgeese, Duo," he added softly, dropping his gaze and gesturing helplessly with the hands that were still wrapped around the coffee cup that had somehow become an anchor. "I don't understand what's happening," he confessed.

Duo got to his feet slowly, taking a first step around the table again. "Take it easy," he soothed, reaching out to put a comforting hand on Treize's shoulder. "I know all this has gotta be confusing as all hell," he admitted. "I'd be screaming the place down in your shoes, not sitting quietly at a breakfast table. There is an explanation of sorts but Zechs was adamant about being the one to give it."

Treize shook his head. "He isn't here," he pointed out. "You are, and I…." he broke off and swallowed.

Duo let his hand tighten its grip, leaning back against the table lightly. "I know," he murmured. "Just… sit and breathe for a couple of minutes, okay? Drink your coffee. If Blondie isn't back here soon, then I'll give it a go, but I really do think it'd be better coming from him.

Treize nodded tiredly, opening his mouth to say something and stopping when someone else spoke first.

"I'm already back here," Zechs said from the doorway. "I take it you changed your mind about having breakfast before the explanation?" he asked, coming into the room and crossing to the table.

Treize didn't look at him, not wanting to face the obvious changes in his friend again, and what he thought they meant. Zechs's voice hadn't changed at all – if he didn't look, he could convince himself, perhaps, that nothing else had, either. "I just want to know what's happening," he replied.

He completely missed the looks the two older men exchanged over his head.

"I'd rather you ate first," Zechs said eventually, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had stretched as he and Duo flung lip-read arguments at one another. "It was the Doctor's advice and it makes sense. Physically speaking, you've had a very bad few days. You're running on reserves you really don't have, I don't need you fainting from exhaustion and I don't think you're going to feel much like food when I'm done."

Treize couldn't help the angry laugh that left him at that. "And you think I do now?" he spluttered. He shook Duo's hand off and pushed back from the table, standing up as he glared at the blond. "I want to know what the hell is going on, and I want to know now. Either one of you will tell me or I will go to every person I can find in this palace-that-shouldn't be-here and ask them all until I find one that will!"

"No one here will talk to you without my permission," Zechs told him coolly, "so that plan won't work. Why don't you sit down again?"

Duo watched as an irate flush rose to the general's face, countering some of the pallor that shock had created. Sapphire eyes snapped a warning that the man was a breath away from exploding as they locked with Zechs's, nailing him in place and all-but daring him to continue speaking.

Watching as the blond drew a breath and opened his mouth to say something else, Duo groaned silently. If the resemblance between the Oz leader and Duo's eldest child went deeper than just their looks, then Treize had a heck of a temper under his blue-blood cool and Zechs was about to provoke it to full fury.

Thinking quickly, Duo took a step forward and put his hand back on the younger man's shoulder, applying downward force. "Your Majesty, you're being a prick," he said flatly, pinning the blond with a meaningful look. "And general, you need to learn to follow good advice when you're given it. Sit down and try to curb the urge to interrogate us all until we give you the answers you want." He pressed down harder, all-but forcing the taller man back into his chair. "In fact, why don't we all sit down," Duo suggested, "and try to talk about this as reasonable adults?"

He waited a beat and then suited deed to word, plonking himself back down in the chair next to Treize. He gestured to the one opposite him, inviting Zechs to take it silently.

The King dropped into a moment later with a heavy sigh. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, directing the words at both of the other men. "I'm sorry," he repeated, just for Treize. "I can't begin to imagine what all this must feel like for you. It's hard enough dealing with it from my end."

The general nodded warily and Duo summoned his trademark smile. "Perhaps that's as good a place for us to start as any, then," he quipped. "General, we know you want answers and we understand why. I've already said I'd be screaming bloody murder until I got them in your place, and I'm sure Blondie would agree with me. Maybe we need to remember that more when we talk to you. Similarly though, perhaps you can try to understand that you're not the only one affected by this. If you can hang on to the patience you've been giving us a little longer, this will all be much easier on everyone."

Treize gave Duo an assessing look. "All right," he allowed carefully.

"Good." Duo smiled. "Right, then. Blondie, it's all yours."

Zechs blinked, caught off-guard, then squared his shoulders and looked across the table at the youngest of the three men. "Where do I start?" he wondered, speaking to himself. "What do you remember?" he asked Treize.

The redhead shrugged. "Tallgeese," he answered. "I remember being in the Tallgeese. I remember pressing the self-destruct. I remember the explosion. After that, there's nothing until I woke in your guest room this morning."

Zechs nodded. "You don't recall meeting Dorothy and Aleks at all?"

"No." Treize shook his head. "The last time I recollect speaking to Dorothy was at a Romefeller conference just after Dermail died, and before I sent her to you on the Libra. I take it that's not the case?"

"No, it isn't," Zechs agreed. "You saw her when you first arrived here, three days ago. She, in fact, was the first to insist that you were you, and not some sort of impostor." He sighed. "She's probably going to be quite upset that you don't remember her impassioned defence of you."

Treize reached out and snared his coffee-cup again, mostly for something to do with his hands whilst they talked, since the coffee itself was now quite cold. He saw Zechs register the action, and raised an eyebrow at the slight smile that touched the blonde's lips. "It'll probably come back to me. Other things have been," he said. "It took me until I was shaving to remember Tallgeese."

"Your memory is coming back, then. That's good." Zechs let his smile show fully for a moment. "Sally said it would but it's nice to hear it, all the same."

"I take it there are things I'm still missing?" Treize asked.

"A fair bit, yes." Zechs stopped, looking a shade uncomfortable. "Ah, if you don't remember Doro, then you won't recall Aleks either, will you? Right." He cast a glance at Duo, then looked back at Treize. "This might be a bit of a surprise for you but Aleks is…."

"Your son," Treize finished for him, making the older man sit back in astonishment. "Your son by Lucrezia Noin, I believe you said?"

Duo began chuckling to himself as Zechs blinked blankly for a few seconds. "Now, how on Earth do you know that?" he demanded. "Did Duo tell you?"

Treize shook his head. "No. Just a snippet of memory. I can't place when or where it was but I recall a boy who looks very much like you introducing himself as Aleksander Peacecraft."

Zechs stared for another few seconds. "Doro is going to be annoyed. That happened when you first got here!" He closed his eyes briefly, then gestured lightly. "You arrived here in the Palace – in my morning room, to be precise – late in the afternoon three days ago. Aleks and Dorothy were making their way up to their rooms after spending the day in Newport City and they found you, completely by chance. It was a bit of good luck, actually. That room can go unused for weeks at a time, normally." He shrugged. "They thought you were Dorothy's son Felix at first, which was quite a surprise because he's supposed to be in Bordeaux inspecting the family estates until the end of the month."

"Glad to know someone's looking after things," Treize commented, and had to hide a smile when Zechs's eyes widened slightly.

The blond shook it off predictably quickly and didn't change the subject. "You were… hurt," he continued, "and you asked for me. It was you calling me Zechs that tipped Doro off to the fact that you weren't who you appeared to be. Aleks came to find me when she sent him."

Treize was looking down at the tabletop, turning the cup slowly in his hands as he listened. "Do I really look that much like him?" he quizzed, curious. It would be very odd if he did. Certainly, Treize wasn't about to deny that his family were distinctive in the way they looked but it was predominantly on the male side. The general had always known that he was identifiable as a Khushrenada on first glance, particularly by people who had known his father, but he and Dorothy were related through his mother, Lady Anna, and through Duke Dermail. Dorothy, therefore, had no Khushrenada blood and so couldn't have passed any to her son – which should have meant, logically, that the boy couldn't bear Treize any real similarity.

It was Duo who answered him. "I don't know how much it will hold up if the two of you ever stand next to each other but there's definitely something." He laughed. "Hadn't occurred to me, actually, until Doro told me what had happened, but yeah, the two of you are rather similar. Trick of genetics, I guess. There's a lot of Doro in Felix. He has her build and bone structure – and those bloody eyebrows! About the only things he gets from me are my eyes and my hair, and the two of us are close enough in hair colour for it to add to the effect rather than diminish it." He gave a quick shrug. "I'm not sure you're mirror images of each other but you could definitely pass for brothers if you had to. Especially with the age gap being as small as it is," he added offhandedly.

The thought caught Treize by surprise. It wasn't something he'd considered until now, but assuming he was as old as he recalled himself being, then he was closer in age – much closer – to Duo's child than he was to Duo himself or Dorothy, or to Zechs. It made him shiver. "Can I ask…?" he started, feeling all the strangeness that had begun to fade away as they talked come roaring back. "How old is Aleks?"

There was sympathy in Zechs's eyes when he answered. "Nineteen."

Treize nodded. "What happened, then?" he asked, not wanting to deal with the maths of that right then.

Zechs gave him a look which said he understood what Treize was doing, but he continued his explanation, telling the redhead about the argument they'd had, about him not believing Treize was who he said he was – something for which he apologised repeatedly – and about how he'd dragged the younger man down to the basement.

The tale triggered more snippets of memory but nothing of any real significance until Zechs drifted into a hesitant, loaded silence.

Treize looked up from his cup turning as the older man leaned forward a little.

"You need to understand something before I tell you the next bit," Zechs said, his voice soft but intense. "I didn't know who you were. I had no reason to suspect you were really you. If you knew… I've seen so many fake Treize Khushrenada's that I've lost count of them. Some of them were incredibly convincing, especially at first when we still thought there was a chance…." He shook his head, something raw and hurt flashing in his eyes. "I've met men who were more you than you are. I thought you were another of them. I only meant to scare you off."

"I can understand that." Treize found a smile for his friend. "Perhaps it will amuse you to know that I've come across one or two 'Milliardo Peacecrafts' in the last couple of years? The association between our families was well known in certain circles and there were a few people who believed a sufficiently pretty blue-eyed, blond-haired boy would be enough to distract me. They never did figure out why it didn't work!"

It made Duo laugh, at least. Zechs simply shook his head again.

"I shouldn't have done it," he confessed. "I'm incredibly sorry for it. I'll never forgive myself if it turns out I've hurt you in any way but…"

"But?"

"But it certainly was enough to authenticate who you are. No one else could have generated the readings you did, and it was only a low-power test…"

Treize felt himself go cold all over. "Low power test of what?" he snapped. "Did you…?"

He caught his breath as it all came back in a rush, the cup smashing on the floor when Treize dropped it as he reeled back in his chair, his body locking up on him. He saw the workshop and the suit, saw Zechs force him into it, saw him start the system up.

He recalled all the images the suit had generated, working as it had been meant to for only the second time in its existence and felt them burn into his mind all over again. Too much information for anyone to process, even with the system on low. He'd only ever used the Epyon once on full power but it had been enough – God, had it been enough – and then sworn never to again. The suit had told him he had no future, had shown him that no one had any future and the knowledge had come close to driving him mad.

He tumbled from the chair as remembered shock made his body start seizing, and was distantly thankful to whoever caught him and saved him from the bruising landing, but his attention was on all the images of everything that he was missing.

It was, he realised dimly, everything that he had missed. He was being given years worth of knowledge that he had never lived. Epyon had been right the first time – Treize Khushrenada had no future. He saw the moment that Tallgeese vaporised, the power of the blast a shock even to him, saw Zechs and Heero square off against each other one last time to end the war.

He saw the world steady into a shocked peace, saw a flash of a red-haired child – her roots reaching back into the weave of Treize's past – start another war, and saw the Gundam Pilots team up with Une and Zechs to stop it.

He saw Zechs and Noin run to Mars together so that Zechs could heal, finding himself for the first time, grieving for his friend and lover, and moving on as best he could. He saw Duo and Dorothy meet face to face for the first time and fall instantly in lust with each other. He saw their lust bite back when she became pregnant a scant year later, saw the two of them marry and have their son and learn to love each other.

He saw Zechs and Noin make the decision to have a child, saw the baby turn to little boy and then to a gangly pre-adolescent. He registered that Noin was suddenly gone.

He saw Relena and Quatre fall in love. Saw the birth of their daughter and Dorothy's second child.

He saw Une's life, and Heero Yuy's and Trowa Barton's. He saw Chang Wufei's.

He saw what the world had become and it made his heart sing. He saw what was coming and it made him scream.

When he came back to himself, he was being held in someone's arms and he could feel strong fingers stroking through his hair soothingly. He coughed weakly and instantly there was a glass of water at his lips, the chill liquid easing the strain in his throat.

He opened his eyes to see Zechs looking down at him. The man was pale with fear and looked halfway to crying. He began to speak and Treize lifted a heavy hand to rest gentle fingers across his mouth.

"How long?" he asked softly, lifting them away again.

Zechs hesitated. "Twenty five years," he said eventually and there was a world of apology in his voice. "As far as we know, you've been dead for twenty five years."

Treize nodded, accepting that as best he could, and then reached up, slipped his arms around the older man and clung as he began to shake in reaction to it all.


	6. Chapter 6

Treize took the heavy crystal snifter that Zechs handed him gratefully, gripping it in both hands and balancing it on one knee to be sure of keeping hold of it as he watched the older man sink into the soft chair opposite him with a sigh.

"I know it's a little early for it," Zechs said, "but you look like you need it."

Treize glanced down at the glass, then lifted it and knocked the inch of rich amber liquid back in one go. It burned his throat on the way down but the heat and the potent, smoky taste felt remarkably good against the cold shakiness still gripping his body.

He'd been rather surprised – dimly, and through the haze of the reaction he was in the grip of – when Zechs had gathered him up and stood, lifting him easily and carrying him from the dining room across the corridor into this little sun-soaked sitting room. Before he could protest, he'd found himself settled onto the cushions of a wonderfully comfortable over-stuffed couch and held gently until he'd gotten himself together. When Treize had moved to sit up, Zechs had let him go and gone to a little cabinet in a corner of the room to fix the glass of whisky.

The general put the empty snifter down on the antique coffee table in front of the couch and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to centre himself.

"How do you feel?" Zechs asked him quietly.

Treize shrugged. "How am I supposed to feel?" he wondered. "I'm not entirely sure it's all sunk in yet."

The older man nodded in understanding. "I've had a few moments like that. Take your time." He reached out to put his hand on a phone very like the one in Treize's bedroom. "Is there anything I can get you? I have a nanny-turned-governess who makes the most fabulous cocoa. I'm sure she'll be willing to spice it a little if I tell her it's for a grown up."

Treize shook his head. "I'm all right." He looked up, and sighed ruefully. "It's silly. I can run a war, organise a revolution, and even orchestrate my own death without turning a hair. Tell me I've survived and I'm falling apart at the seams."

"One could imagine that the small matter of being tossed a quarter of a century through time with no knowledge of how you got there might have something to do with it," Zechs pointed out.

"Perhaps," Treize allowed and it won a small chuckle.

"I shouldn't fret over it too much. A lot of it is probably physical, actually. I wasn't trying to get you to eat just to put off having to explain. Experience has taught me always to feed people and let it settle for a while before shocking them half to death."

"Oh?"

"Fatherhood," Zechs explained with a grim smile. "Having to tell your eight year old son that his mother has been killed teaches a brutal master class in delivering bad news."

"Yes," Treize agreed carefully. "I imagine it would, at that." He gave it a moment, then asked, "Can I ask what happened to Noin?"

"A sniper," Zechs answered, his voice low. "Relena and I had just stepped out of a full day's ESUN summit and we were standing outside the council chambers waiting for our car to be brought round. Noin came to join us, discussing what we were going to have for dinner that night, or something like that. The shooter fired from the roof of an adjacent building, aiming at either Relena or me – we're not sure. Noin somehow caught a flash of light off his scope just before he pulled the trigger and put herself in the way. The first round went into my shoulder, the other caught Noin in the back of the head."

Treize winced, able to picture the scene far too easily. He'd been the target of several assassination attempts over the last few years, and twice had watched the bright young soldiers serving as his bodyguard's take bullets intended for him. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "She was a wonderful and amazing woman. It must have been a crushing loss."

"It hurt," Zechs replied simply. "It had consequences, too. Relena would probably be married to Heero now, rather than Quatre, if it hadn't happened. And, of course, Aleks has never been quite the same. I don't think he's ever quite forgiven me for surviving when she died."

Treize raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure he doesn't think that."

Zechs snorted. "I'm sure he does – he's told me so several times, but that's adolescence for you." He got to his feet and scooped up the glass, taking it back to the cabinet.

"It wasn't for me," Treize replied sharply. "It wasn't for you. I hope you put him across your desk for it."

"Treize," Zechs said dryly, lifting the whisky bottle by way of offering a refill, "think what I was doing at nineteen. I can hardly comment on teenage tantrums – and neither can you, given that you spent your time plotting the downfall of a world government!" He splashed the alcohol into the glass and came back across the room. "And I've never struck my son. I've never needed to."

Treize took the glass from his friend silently, biting down on his reply as he realised that he had no place offering any further commentary.

Zechs sat back down and smiled knowingly. "Say it," he said, making Treize start a little.

"Oh," Treize murmured, taking a sip of his whisky. "Ah, I was simply thinking that if Aleks thinks it's all right to speak to his father in such a disrespectful and deliberately hurtful way, then maybe you have needed to discipline him more. I know I'm not a father," he continued, missing completely the way his friend flinched and bit his lip, "but I was an instructor for a few years and it was my experience that most teens benefit from a firm hand. Especially the boys. There were very few cadets it didn't work with eventually."

Zechs smiled. "Probably true, but Aleks isn't a military cadet." He laughed softly. "And strange as it might sound, I like that he feels secure enough to pitch fits at me occasionally. He's a product of his time, and I thank God for it."

Treize had to smile in agreement. "If you're happy with him then…"

"Most of the time." Zechs propped an elbow on the arm of his chair, and looked at the younger man with an expression that was both happy and a little wistful. "This is very strange," he commented. "I've lost count of how many times I've wished you were around to talk to like this, especially after Noin died."

Treize raised an eyebrow. "Really? Surely you had your friends? Dorothy, or Relena?"

"Oh, yes. Of course. But it wasn't the same." He tilted his head to one side a little more. "Would you think me terribly forward if I say that I missed you?"

Treize shook his head. "Not too badly, I hope?"

"Occasionally," Zechs admitted softly. "Aleks was named for you, you know. Your middle name, of course, and not your first – I don't think he would have thanked me for making him one of about five million Treize's – but the thought was there. The only difference is the slight respelling to make it the Sancian variant – Aleksander rather than Alexandrè."

Treize blinked, caught between surprise and an amazing sense of privilege. "I… thank you!" he said. "I'm honoured."

"That was the idea," Zechs replied.

They sat, gazing at one another for a few moments before Treize spluttered. "Five million Treize's!" he exclaimed. "What on Earth…?!"

Zechs started laughing loudly. "I knew you'd react like that!" he cheered. "I'll have to tell Quatre he owes me a bottle of scotch. Yes, five million, thereabouts, at last census count. I'll be able to address you as Treize in public without raising so much as an eyebrow because most of them are between 20 and 25 years old. You fit the demographic perfectly, given your age now. You'd have been born two months after the end of the Eve War, and 'Treize' was one of the most popular boy's names for the first few years, especially in the old European countries. There are about five million instances of 'Treize' as a first name, and God alone knows how many as a second or third."

"Good grief!" Treize shook his head in incredulity. "Those poor children. Did no one think to inform their parents that it was a ridiculous idea?"

Zechs shrugged. "Can't argue with heroism, my friend. You're going to get a real kick out of reading some of the history texts and biographies that have been written of you."

There was utter disbelief in Treize's eyes as he stared at the blond for a moment, then downed the rest of his whisky, put the glass down and buried his face in his hands. "Sweet merciful God," he moaned. "Biographies?"

Zechs was on his feet before he really knew he'd moved, reaching across the table to put a hand on his friend's shoulders. "Too much?" he asked gently, wincing at the way the man's breath was catching.

Treize just shook his head helplessly. "Biographies!" he choked. "Oh, my God!"

"Treize!" Zechs reached down with his other hand as well, intending to pull the smaller man up. He stopped when a hitching, bubbling sort of noise rose from the general.

The man dropped his hands to wave at Zechs feebly. "Biographies!" he repeated and dissolved into peeling laughter.

The blond just stood and stared. He hadn't seen Treize go off on a giggling fit like this since they'd both been children, and he didn't think he'd _ever_ seen the man laugh so hard he was crying with it and clutching at his ribs. There was an edge to the sound that Zechs – if he were honest – didn't entirely like, but he recognised it for what it was, a much-needed release of tension, and soon found that it was infectious and that he was chuckling right along with his friend.

He was smiling happily when Treize finally pulled himself together and wiped at his eyes. "Oh…" Treize sighed. "I am sorry! But really – Biographies? What on Earth did they find to write?"

"Enough," Zechs answered him good-humouredly. "I have a few in the library, I'm sure – publishers keep sending me copies in the hopes that I'll endorse one or the other. I'll let you have at them when you've got your bearings a bit." He looked at the younger man assessingly for a moment, then held out a hand. "Come with me," he offered quietly.

Treize hesitated for a few seconds before he put his hand in Zechs's and stood up. "Where are we going?" he asked, as the older man closed strong fingers around his own tightly.

"I thought you might enjoy a walk in the gardens," Zechs told him, tugging gently, and leading his friend towards the door. "I usually make a point of spending half an hour or so a day out there and it's a lovely morning. You never were one to be indoors if you didn't have to be."

Treize smiled at the thought. He'd caught glimpses of the grounds of the palace through the various windows he'd passed during the morning, and had seen enough to know that Zechs had restored the gardens as well as the palace itself. He nodded his agreement and followed willingly.

As they neared a heavy wooden door, Zechs straightened his posture a little, letting go of Treize's hand and running the other over his hair.

He stopped before the door and turned to look at the younger man. "Just a word of caution about one of the things that has changed since you were last a guest here," he started. "Sanc was in a bad way when I agreed to take the throne, and one of the ways we footed the bill for the restoration of the Palace and the Monarchy was to make ourselves a tourist attraction. We agreed to open the Palace and the grounds, as well as various other Crown Properties, to the public. The original plan was to discontinue it when we had the country's economy back on an even keel but that's never quite happened. Tourism has become a huge business again in the last fifteen years and a large part of Sanc's annual revenue has become dependant on it. We're perfect for it, I suppose, given the nature of the country itself, the history and the fact that we're one of only three fully functioning Monarchies left in the world, and the only one whose leaders also hold political positions, but it has meant some changes in how the Palace is run."

He gestured at the door. "You'll notice when you get more familiar with the place again that there are some odd things about the doors. They're all made of heavy wood, but some are stained and some are painted, and it has nothing to with the room or the corridor they're in."

Treize nodded, glancing back over his shoulder to the door they had just come through, and then back at the one in front of him. Sure enough, the first was stained and the second was painted, when it would have made far more sense from a decorator's perspective to have them match. Was there a reason for it, then?

"It's that way deliberately," Zechs confirmed. "It serves as a visual reminder for those of us who live here. Within the sections of the Palace that are strictly private, all the doors are whatever wood stain will suit the décor best; within the areas that are opened to the public most of the time, they're all painted. Any door painted white, like this one, signifies that you're about to cross from the private areas to the public. It's worth making a point of noticing them, if only so you aren't caught off guard by the pack of tourists that could be standing on the other side of it. I should also warn you that I expect a reasonable degree of decorum in any behaviour that could be on public show, and I've been known to be rather harsh with people who don't come up to snuff."

"That seems fair enough," Treize said, and Zechs nodded.

"I didn't think you'd be one to object. The same thing applies in the gardens – but with metal gates for the public areas and wooden ones for the private. A white gate marks a transition point. It is possible to get everywhere within the private areas of both without ever setting foot in the public ones, but – so you know, and don't complain at me later – it will often mean going quite some distance out of your way, and sometimes actually outside and back in again at a different entrance."

Treize shrugged. "I don't see why it would be a problem," he said, "if all I have to do is not make a show of myself."

Zechs gave him a small, impish smile. "Well, there's the rub, actually, and why some of the family will always take the detours. There's been something of an understanding between the family, the tour-operators, and the press for years now: Public areas must be public – completely so – if the Private ones are to be private. It boils down to an agreement between both sides that goes something like this – they will leave us alone in private, which includes not taking photo's through windows or trying to sneak through the transition doors, as long as we give them something in return. That something would be that if you walk into the public areas, you're fair game for anyone who may be around."

Treize raised an eyebrow. "In what sense?"

"That depends on who's about. Generally speaking, it means standing chatting to tourists for a few minutes, occasionally filling them in on some bit of history about the place and often posing for lots of photos with them. Some of the tour guides have been working the palace for years, and will stop and chat just to catch up with what's happening. They've become acquaintances over the years, and even friends. They leave anyone in Staff uniform alone, and they won't approach the younger children."

"What about the Press? Are they still as vulture-ish as I remember?"

"Some of them. The press expect the photos, especially in the lead up to some big event. They also expect you to answer any questions they ask, although we do have a protocol about what they can and can't ask, and you can 'no comment' to a point." Zechs shrugged. "It may seem odd, but it actually helps us to control what information gets to the media, and certainly the possibility that they may get to meet and talk to and have pictures taken with members of the Royal Family is a big part of the tourist draw."

Treize nodded. "I can see how it would be. It seems fair enough, certainly. I'll try not to embarrass you."

Zechs chuckled. "I'm sure you won't, but I wanted to warn you because I'm probably going to get pounced on by both groups the moment we step through this door. We're in the middle of the school half-term break, which means a fairly high level of tourism, and we're in the run-up to a big Social Function – our annual Halloween Fundraiser Ball."

"It's October, then?" Treize asked quietly after a moment, and Zechs blinked at him.

"Oh, damn!" he swore, as it dawned on him what Treize was asking. "I haven't told you the bloody date, have I? I'm so sorry! Yes, it's October – October 20th, to be precise. You are, of course, invited to the Ball, which is the end of next week. I'm sure we'll be able to find you a costume by then."

Treize smiled coolly. "Have my uniform cleaned and repaired," he said. "A bit of white face paint and talcum powder in my hair and I'll go as my own ghost."

His words were met with complete silence from the blond, the older man dropping his gaze and refusing to meet Treize's eyes. "I'd rather you didn't," he said softly.

Treize watched him, then bit his lip. "I'm sorry," he offered. "That was rather… tasteless of me, I suspect."

Zechs shook himself. "A shade close to the bone, perhaps. I'm still trying to adjust to the fact that you're here. For me, you've been dead for the last twenty-five years," he confessed. "I wouldn't like to test my grip on reality by having you look like your own ghost, not yet. Maybe next year."

Treize shook his head. "Maybe not at all. I don't think anyone but myself would find it funny, and it might not be wise to advertise my identity that heavily."

"Dorothy, maybe, or Duo. The children probably would, but it's less of an issue for them, of course." Zechs broke off and smirked. "Felix definitely would. He actually dressed up as you once, a couple of years ago, blue contact lenses and all."

"Yes, I vaguely recall Aleks saying something about an 'outfit' when he still thought I was Dorothy's son. I got the impression that you didn't appreciate it much."

Zechs sighed. "I didn't, and I let him know it, too. As did his mother." He caught Treize's look of curiosity and tilted his head. "What? Were you expecting me to have? Put yourself in my shoes – what you have done?"

The redhead smiled. "Torn strips off of him for the nerve, and then given Aleks a copy of your uniform, just to complete the look. I always did have a twisted sense of humour."

Zechs looked a little taken aback. "Yes, you did." He shook his head ruefully. "Christ, the media frenzy that would cause – the press wouldn't know whether to love it or crucify us for it."

"'Loved or hated, but never ignored' – it's an old rule," Treize murmured. "The publicity would certainly be good for your tourism, and you could always pass it off as youthful stupidity and issue a formal apology if it really did offend anyone."

"Remind me to tell my press agent he's fired, will you?" Zechs replied, grinning suddenly. "I don't think I'll be needing him anymore. I'd forgotten how damn good you were at stuff like that."

"Necessity is the best teacher," Treize quipped dryly.

"Quite," the older man admitted. "Well, that idea aside, I'll inform our court dresser that she has another person to cater for and let her come up with something. If a hyperactive blonde accosts you with a tape measure in the next couple of days, it'll be her wanting your measurements. Do let her take them – she'll need to have them eventually anyway, for all the ceremonial stuff you're going to need."

Treize raised his eyebrows, but nodded his agreement, wondering silently what the older man meant by 'ceremonial stuff.' He didn't ask – recognising that it would probably mean another long explanation and knowing that he would be best to assimilate the information he would need in small doses.

He flicked a glance at the door and watched as Zechs picked up on the hint, reaching for the handle. "Brace yourself," the older man warned, and stepped into the corridor on the other side.

Treize took a deep breath and followed him, both eager for, and nervous of, this first exposure to a world he didn't know. The noise level in the corridor was the first thing he noticed, realising that the dividing door must be soundproofed somewhere under the white paint to have blocked the collection of voices rising from the crowd of people ambling around the hall.

He glanced around swiftly, trying to get his bearings as Zechs reached past him and closed the door firmly behind him. "Second floor portrait gallery," the older man murmured into Treize's ear, "and the code for the door is 1-2-1-7-1. I'm sure you'll be able to remember it."

The former general nodded slowly. Yes, he was sure he'd be able to recall his birth date. "Didn't that picture used to be in the dining room?" he asked, pointing discreetly to a portrait of Zechs's paternal grandmother.

The King glanced in the right direction, and then nodded. "Yes. It's mostly little things like the placement of pictures that you'll find have changed. We tried to restore as closely as possible, paintings and all, but it makes more sense – if one thinks of the tourism again – to have family portraits all collected together." He gestured at the room himself. "If you look more closely, you'll notice that the room has been arranged in a rough timeline to show the history of the Royal Family. The brass wires and plaques between the pictures give important dates and facts."

Treize let his eyes skim around the room, seeing what Zechs was describing. It was a clever bit of arrangement and a beautiful effect. The pictures, varied as they were in style and formality and even in condition, covered the upper half of the walls in the room, woven into a lovely tapestry by the connecting brass wires. Framed by the rich cream of the paint behind them and the golden tones of the wood panels of the lower halves of the walls, and lit by the sunlight flooding through the full-length windows at either end of the hall, the room was warm and peaceful – a fitting tribute to the people it commemorated.

"How much time do you spend in here?" Treize asked softly.

Zechs turned his head to look down at the smaller man again, smiling sadly. "Not as much as I used to. It took me five years to put this together, tracking down pictures and having them restored, or commissioning new ones to be painted from file images and as the children reached suitable ages. It was one of the most time consuming parts of the restoration – this and the Eve Wars exhibit around the corner. I'll let you see that some other time," he added as Treize opened his mouth to express his curiosity.

The redhead was prevented from asking directly by soft laughter from behind him. He turned his head to look for the source and came face to face with a small, neat woman dressed in a grey suit and holding a clipboard.

"You're doing my job for me, Your Majesty," she chirped, dropping Zechs a little bob of a curtsey.

Zechs smiled at her. "My apologies, Elaine. I don't mean to. I was just answering a question for my friend here."

The woman answered his smile with one of her own. "Oh, I don't think anyone will complain," she teased. "Would you mind?" she asked, gesturing at the crowd that was beginning to turn and notice the two men with much chattering and excitement.

Zechs looked at Treize for a moment, asking silently if the younger man would mind the delay and the former general just shook his head. "All right," Zechs told Elaine. "I have a few minutes, I suppose. Do you want me to answer questions or just to talk?"

The tour-guide – or, at least, that's what Treize was assuming she was – beamed up at Zechs. "If you could answer a few questions, I'm sure they'll be happy. I've already run through the standard talk with them. We were about to move on."

The blond nodded. "Ask them to stick to this room and the history of the Palace, please. I'm not answering questions about the Wars today."

"Fair enough. We haven't got to the War exhibit yet anyway." Quickly, raising her voice just enough to be heard above the general hum of conversation, she called her group together and explained what was about to happen.

Treize made to take a discreet step to one side, out of the direct focus of attention, and stopped when Zechs caught his wrist and held him in place. He gave the older man a questioning look and received a reassuring smile in response. "They've taken you for Felix, most likely, which means it'll look very odd if you keep out of the way. He's very co-operative with the tourists, normally, and makes a point of stopping to talk if he at all can. If you get asked anything directly that you can't answer just pass the question to me."

The younger man nodded, wondering why Zechs was under the impression he'd be able to answer any question.

He watched and listened as Zechs fielded half a dozen questions about various people and the Palace itself, learning that one of Zechs's great-great-grandfathers had been notorious for his extra-marital affairs, personally founding several cadet branches of the Peacecraft family that were still being traced, and that the Palace had been restored, as much as was possible, with materials and craftsmen from the Sanc Kingdom, with most of the suppliers to the household still being local.

He also learned that the Halloween Ball to which he'd been so recently invited really was a huge deal in Sanc, hotly anticipated for months before, mainly because the costume theme of the Ball and the Charity to which the proceeds would go were kept a secret until Zechs gave his opening speech at the Ball itself.

He was drifting into his own thoughts a little when someone caught his attention.

A man at the back of group had queried if Zechs would mind answering a more personal question, asking, "I was wondering, Your Majesty, if there was any truth to the rumours that a Royal Wedding might be in the offing?"

Treize blinked. A Royal Wedding? Who? Relena and Quatre were married, so it couldn't be her, and surely Aleks was too young. Was Zechs involved with someone?

Instantly, Treize found that he felt utterly sick. The idea that Zechs could have a partner, or a wife, hadn't really had time to occur to Treize yet, but as he stood there waiting for Zechs's answer, he realised that he'd been reacting for the most part as though things were still as they'd always been between himself and his oldest friend. It was a false conclusion, of course – Aleks proved that. Clearly, Zechs had moved on enough to father the boy with Noin and he'd had more than a decade since her death to move on again. It was likely, very likely, that he'd met someone else that he could care for to some degree. Until three days ago, there hadn't been a thing to stop him.

It was possible that there still wasn't.

Swallowing carefully, Treize forced himself to meet the sudden look that Zechs shot at him, hoping his sudden sense of loss and light-headedness wasn't showing on his face. If Zechs was involved, or even engaged, what did that mean for Treize's place in life? He'd been told several times that morning that Zechs had missed him, that he was happy to have him back, and he'd taken it at face value, never stopping to question it.

Duo had been right when he'd accused Treize of forgetting that his arrival affected more people than himself. For the first time, it was brutally clear to Treize that his being here could create all sorts of difficulties for his friends and family. They'd moved on, all of them; they'd grieved and healed and lived, and they'd done it without him. If it had been a few months, or a few years, then perhaps there would have still been a place for him, but a quarter of a century…!

"Those rumours are rather exaggerated, I'm afraid," Zechs said, a heartbeat later. "I promise you that if I had any intention of marrying, an announcement would be made."

"What about the fact that you've invited Lady Anna Une to the Halloween Ball as your personal guest? You've been seen with her a few times now and the two of you go back a long way. There's been a lot of speculation that you were waiting for your son to reach his majority before you began courting her formally."

Treize saw Zechs's face tighten, saw the little look he shot the tour guide, and it made him wince. Zechs and the Lady?

"The Lady and I are friends," Zechs countered coldly. "You're quite right when you say we've known each other a long time."

"But…"

"I'm sorry," the tour guide broke in, "but I think the King has somewhere he needs to be and we've kept him quite long enough."

There was chorus of thank yous, and she directed the group towards the end of the corridor. "I'm sorry about that, sir," she apologised to Zechs. "I suspect he's a reporter from one of the tabloids you've banned from the Palace. He's been asking me questions like that all day."

"Not your fault, Elaine. Thank you for the timely interruption."

The woman bobbed Zechs another curtsey and smiled. "You're welcome, sir," she chirped, and hurried after her group.

Zechs came back to Treize's side with a tight smile on his face. "Sorry about that," he murmured. "They would choose today to demonstrate the downside of our open-door policy." He ran an inspecting look over Treize. "Are you all right? You look a little…."

The former general took a deep breath and made himself nod. Duo's words firmly in mind, he answered, "I'm fine," and committed himself to remembering that he really wasn't the only person involved in this whole bizarre scenario.


	7. Chapter 7

A little while later, Zechs watched Treize raptly as the younger man moved about the rose garden, wondering if it would be appropriate to tell the younger man that the sight was something of a dream come true for the blond.

Zechs had personally designed the garden during the early years of the restoration, choosing plants and digging beds by hand, refusing to let any of the army of gardeners that had been hired touch any of it until he was sure it was as complete as he could make it. Many was the early morning that Noin had come out to find him pottering about in it, and she had, more often than not, simply gone to her knees at his side, helping him with whatever he was doing until he indicated he was done. It was one of the things he'd loved about her most – that she could understand so well what demons drove him from their bed and that she never resented the solace he found from them in creating a memorial to the lover she'd replaced.

The rose garden was closed to the public and always had been, and though it had started as a monument to a dead general, Zechs knew that over the years it had come to mean many things to many people. For Dorothy and Wufei, it had come to mean everyone they had lost during the wars, Treize amongst them; for Duo and Trowa, it was a place to recall their broken childhoods by its very contrast to what they had grown up with; for Heero and Quatre, it was the representation of the peace they had fought so very hard for, and what they had suffered to achieve it.

For Relena, the garden was where she came to contemplate her relationship with Heero – her first love as much as Treize had been Zechs's. Heero had vanished into thin air for almost two years after Noin's death, and by the time he returned, he'd been gone long enough that Relena had set aside the last of her childhood, fallen in love with, and married Quatre. As far as Zechs knew, his sister was perfectly happy in her marriage, but that didn't stop her occasionally coming to the rose garden and thinking about what might have been.

As they grew older, the garden had come to mean something for the children, too. It was the place where they'd come to learn of the amazing, frightening history that bound their parents together, hearing stories of mobile suits and battles, grand hopes and sweeping destruction – the revolution and war they were too young to have known. Slowly, as time passed, hearing such first-hand and personal accounts of events that their schoolmates and friends only knew about from textbooks and lessons began to leave its impression, and the garden became more than a collection of flowers for them as well.

What Felix and his sister, Helen, saw in it, Zechs had never asked, but Katerina, Relena's daughter, used it to commemorate the grandparents she had never known – all of them – and Wufei had made it the place where his son came to practice the traditional techniques he was learning.

Aleks, Zechs knew, came to garden to mourn his mother, and to remember what a wonderful woman she had been. The King had never thought of keeping the truth of the garden from his son and Aleks, even as a young child, had realised what it said about his mother that she had put so much work into it. More than once, the older man had found his son grieving for his mother amongst the flowers she had helped to plant. Sometimes he'd chosen to join the boy and share his pain; others, he'd slipped away quietly, knowing some things couldn't be shared and shouldn't be witnessed.

Perhaps only for Une and Mariemeia did the garden mean the same thing as it did for Zechs and they, like him, had spent their time here over the years, and then begun avoiding it altogether.

Watching from a corner as Treize moved from bush to bush, his fingers brushing the petals of those in bloom delicately, his head tilting as he inhaled the heavy aroma, Zechs wondered if the younger man recognised the theme of the plants. Every one of them meant something, every one commemorated some particular place or occasion or sentiment that had been important to the two of them.

Zechs had poured his soul into the plants the younger man was pottering through at the moment, sinking everything he'd felt for his captain and soul mate into the soil as he worked it – all the love and passion and longing from a lifetime's intimacy, all the anger and confusion and resentment the events of the War had left him with.

It was here that he'd worked through the worst of his grief, too. More than one of the plants had seen his tears as their first watering and more than one was a replacement for an earlier specimen destroyed when he couldn't bear for another second the knowledge that the man he was creating the garden for would never see it.

The place really was a shrine – one that Zechs thought he might finally be able to enjoy as much as other members of his family did. The look on Treize's face when he'd seen the garden had made all the hours and hours of often heart-breaking work that had gone into it over the years seem worth it.

As the King watched Treize make his way to the middle of the garden, following the meandering paths until he reached the focal point, he wondered idly what it would come to mean to the man it had been made for.

In the very centre of the garden, alone in a clear space and flanked by two stone benches, a single rose bush had been allowed to grow unchecked. It was wild and straggly, unkempt next to the pruned perfection of the other bushes, but its blooms were perfect – deep red and velvety soft – and it possessed a beauty all its own. Tucked just at the base of the bush was a small stone plinth

Zechs knew by the way the man stiffened the moment Treize read the small brass plaque fixed to that stone, and he made his way to one of the benches on silent feet, sitting down as Treize read the words again, saying them silently. Zechs didn't need to see the plaque to say them with him.

_For the soldiers of the future – may there be no need for them_

_For the soldiers of the past – may they never be forgotten_

"It seemed appropriate," the older man said softly, when his companion looked at him with eyes that were perhaps too bright. "I thought… you wouldn't mind the amendment," he added.

Treize shook his head. "Of course I don't," he replied, his voice hoarse. He turned slowly, looking over the whole garden. "This is…"

"For you," Zechs answered quietly, wondering if it had been a mistake to bring his friend here so soon. He seemed so close to his limits suddenly that Zechs was a little afraid for him.

There was a heartbeat when the blond thought Treize was going to yield, but the younger man simply closed his eyes for a moment, his expression eloquent to his feelings in a way he couldn't have expressed by any other means. It was probably as open as Zechs had ever seen him be.

He opened them again after a time and smiled, his gaze melancholy and joyful both. "That bush needs pruning," he commented and Zechs smiled back at him gently.

"By no one's hand but yours, my friend," he answered warmly.

* * *

Treize knocked on the door to Zechs's office an hour or so later, waiting until he heard the other man call for him to come in before he opened the door and stuck his head through it.

The older man was sitting behind a wide, ornate mahogany desk with a pen in one hand, a coffee cup in the other and papers strewn all over the polished surface. "I was beginning to wonder whether I'd have to come and drag you out of the rose garden by force," he quipped. "Was it boredom or curiosity that made you come and find me?"

Treize had the grace to flush a little as he stepped into the room, not sure whether to stare at the sheer volume of books, files and papers first, or at the discreet gold-framed glasses Zechs had perched on the bridge of his nose. "A bit of both, I think," he confessed. "I made myself come to the conclusion that the roses will still be there tomorrow and came inside. Are you busy?"

The King smiled. "No more than I normally am. It's mostly routine – running a kingdom generates a lot of paper."

"That doesn't surprise me in the least. Oz was bad enough, and the Khushrenada estates were worse, though my solicitors usually did most of that for me." Treize put his head on one side. "I was wondering if that offer to go shopping was still open?"

"Of course it is," Zechs replied. "Like I said, none of this is really urgent and most of it is nothing Relena or Aleks can't do if I ask them nicely enough. Should I feed you first or would you like to wait until we're in the city and find somewhere?"

"Whichever you'd prefer," Treize answered. "I'm still not especially hungry, if I'm honest. I think I've had one too many shocks this morning for my body to even think about something so normal."

The blond nodded sympathetically. "We'll eat in the city, then. I know a restaurant with a chef that could tempt a saint. I've never known anyone refuse the man's cooking and you could stand a few decent meals from the way you look. When did you lose weight?"

Treize raised a surprised eyebrow. "Is it that obvious?" he wondered.

The older man shrugged. "Oh, I'll grant that it could be my memory playing tricks," he admitted, "but I don't think so. I got a fair look at you when I was helping Sally strip you out of your uniform, after all."

That comment had the second eyebrow joining the first. "You have me at a disadvantage, then, I think." Treize shrugged. "I dropped about half a stone when I was under house arrest in Luxembourg and the same again in the last month or so of the war. It was the same cause both times – stress and too much work. Worrying about you is not good for me."

"I know the feeling," Zechs retorted, then shook his head. "Sally isn't going to be pleased. I'd brace yourself for the lecture of a lifetime when she finds out. She has a thing about people making themselves ill for no good reason."

"I take it this 'Sally' is a doctor?" Treize asked, his expression rather wary.

Zechs smiled at him reassuringly, standing up and stepping out from behind his desk. "She is. Sally Po is the Chief Medical Officer for the Preventers," he explained as he walked a few steps and came to a stop to lean back against his desk and look at the other man. "She also happens to be a friend and an ex-Alliance Intelligence Officer. She handles most of the family's medical care already and she seemed like the best choice for you, as well. She'll be able to keep your identity a secret and she's familiar with many of the special needs you're likely to have as a patient."

The younger man nodded a little, frowning. "Medical care was one of things I wanted to ask you about this afternoon, actually," he said. "Would it be too much to hope that my personal physician is still practicing?"

"After twenty-five years?" Zechs reminded, watching as Treize winced at the words. "I have no idea," he admitted. "Why do you ask?"

Treize gave him a careless-looking shrug as a reply. "There are a few matters I should probably discuss with a doctor sometime soon, that's all, and I was hoping it wouldn't have to be a complete stranger." He caught the worried look that touched the blonde's face and shook his head. "It's nothing serious, I promise. Just a few odd issues. I have one or two prescriptions that need refilling, and there's a few things I'd like some advice on but it's all fairly routine."

Zechs didn't look convinced. "I see," he said. "Unfortunately, even if your old doctor is still seeing patients, you can't go near him. How would you explain who you are?" He shook his head. "I'm sorry if it's not what you wanted, but Sally is very good at what she does and you only have to stick with her until we have an identity in place for you. If you don't like her, you'll be free to choose another doctor for yourself as soon as that happens."

The redhead seemed to consider for a moment, his eyes focussed on the bookshelves behind the desk, and then he smiled ruefully. "I'm certain your Sally is perfectly capable, Zechs – I wasn't questioning that – but some of what I wanted to talk about is a little personal and the idea of doing so with a woman I've never met isn't an entirely comfortable one."

Instant curiosity flared in Zechs's pale eyes, tempered with a deep concern and layered with a type of amusement Treize didn't think he'd ever seen in his friend before. There was a moment or two of silence as Zechs looked at the younger man steadily, and then the blond shook his head in a gesture that looked like nothing so much as fond exasperation. "Treize, you have my word that Sally is completely professional," he started quietly, "and that nothing you say will surprise her, but if her gender is a problem for you with this, then I'm sure she has male colleagues she'd be happy to recommend." He paused, then continued, "If you'd rather talk to another man, you only need to say so."

Treize blinked at him for a moment, then flushed deeply and looked away, fixing his eyes on the floor. "Ah, that's not… quite what I meant," he managed, sounding horribly uncomfortable. "Forgive me, I should have said 'person I've never met' not 'woman'. It's not _that_ kind of personal."

Zechs raised an amused eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Not entirely, at any rate," Treize admitted.

That won him a rather knowing smile. "Right. Dare I ask?" Zechs wondered aloud, his eyes sparkling mischievously for a moment.

"If you must," Treize sighed. "It's not something I'd prefer to tell you but I'm not entirely sure what information you need to have now."

Zechs sobered instantly, straightening away from his desk as he pinned the younger man with a steady gaze. "I need to know if there's something wrong that could be dangerous to yourself or to anyone else, or if it's possibly in breach of the law in some way. If none of that is the case, then…." He shrugged.

Treize shook his head. "It won't affect anyone else. It won't affect me as long as I attend to the matter. As for the law… How much has it changed?" He looked away again, his expression suddenly tired and a little lost.

Zechs winced, seeing it, and immediately reached out to put his hands on the younger man's shoulders, squeezing supportively. "Indulge me for a moment," he said softly. "It's 194. We're in your office in Luxembourg. I'm still one of your pilots and you're still my general. Occasionally we go to bed with each other as we have done since we were both far too young for such things. Are you with me?"

Treize nodded, his eyes having drifted closed. "Yes," he agreed quietly.

"Right. Are you going to tell me why you need to speak with a doctor?" Zechs asked

"No," Treize answered immediately. He opened his eyes and looked at his friend. "Absolutely not," he emphasized.

Zechs nodded, squeezing with his hands again. "So, don't tell me now, either," he said. He let Treize go slowly and reached behind him to his desk, picking up a slim, folding phone. "You're currently scheduled to see Sally on Friday morning and it's Tuesday today. Do I need to move the appointment up?" he asked. "The original idea was to give you a few days to get your bearings before subjecting you to both the Preventers and to full medicals, but that was always open to change if necessary. It won't be a problem," he reassured.

The younger man took a deep breath and let it go slowly. "It might be a good idea," he replied. "Another four days on top of the three I was unconscious might be a bit… more than is wise."

"Right." Zechs flipped the phone open and pressed a button, putting it to his ear. There were a few moments when nothing happened and then the phone lit up and Treize could hear the tinny whisper of someone speaking on the other end.

"Anne?" Zechs asked. "Sorry to bother you at work. I need to speak to Sally and I wasn't for dealing with your switchboard." There was another pause. "Yes, my dear, I realise that you aren't a receptionist." He smiled. "No, we're all fine. It's simply that the appointment for our newest addition needs moving up. Sorry?" Zechs asked, then took the phone away from his ear for a moment and rolled his eyes at the younger man. "No," he said. "No, he's fine."

Treize watched in not inconsiderable surprise as the blond smiled affectionately, leaning over his desk to pick up a pen and notepad. "I don't know. No. No, I… What do you mean, why? Because I didn't ask! It's not my business." He winced suddenly. "Anne, love… Anne! Down, girl!"

Treize blinked and struggled to keep himself from choking. Was Zechs really talking to whom Treize thought he was? The general would have been willing to bet it would have taken more than a quarter of a century to get those two on civil terms.

"I don't know," Zechs continued after another pause. "Well, because he told me he could do to speak with a doctor sooner rather than later, that's why, and I'm assuming he's still mentally intact enough to know his own medical needs." Zechs shook his head. "No, I haven't asked him about that, either, and I'm not going to. Let the poor boy have one day's peace, will you?"

Treize caught and held Zechs's eyes at that, raising one eyebrow. 'Poor boy?' he mouthed, letting his expression convey what he thought of being referred to in such a fashion.

Zechs just shrugged, smiling. "For the love of God, woman!" he sighed. "Just let me speak to Sally, will you? I'm using the switchboard next time – which was probably your intention all along!" He paused again, then bit his lip. "All right, just hang on…" He took the phone away from his ear, and covered the pick-up with one hand. "Treize?" he asked, looking at the younger man. "Une," he said, gesturing with the phone. "Do you want to speak with her?"

Treize went still, looking at the phone, then slowly shook his head. "No…no, I'd rather not. There are some things that I… No."

Zechs raised a curious eyebrow. "All right." He put the phone back to his ear. "Sorry about that, Anne, Relena wanted to speak to me. Treize isn't here right now for you to speak to, I'm afraid. He's out in the gardens but I'll tell him you asked for him. You'll see him whenever he comes to see Sally anyway. What? No, I am not feeding you a line. No!" He laughed down the phone. "All right. Yes, I'll see you for dinner tomorrow. Thanks, Anne."

Zechs put the phone face down on his shoulder whilst he chuckled and shook his head. "Honestly, that woman is a dreadful mother-hen sometimes. I'm sure she thinks you're lying somewhere bleeding to death now, but never mind." He lifted the phone again as someone began talking on the other end of it. "Sally. Hello."

For a few seconds, Zechs just listened silently, then he nodded. "I'll tell him. He's why I'm calling, actually. Can we reschedule that appointment?" There was another pause, then Zechs looked over at Treize again. "Will tomorrow morning do? She says she can swing past here this evening if it's something that won't keep, but you'll end up having to go in and see her anyway before the end of the week for a full exam. She'd rather do both at once."

Treize nodded. "Tomorrow is fine," he agreed. "If I'd known I was going to cause such a fuss…" he started.

Zechs waved him off, turning back to his phone. "Tomorrow, Sally. I'll drive him in myself." He smiled again and nodded, though the woman on the other end wouldn't be able to see it. "All right, thanks. Bye."

A few seconds later, he closed the phone and put it back on his desk. "Problem solved. She'll see you in her office tomorrow morning, whenever you're ready. Apparently, you have to dress exam-friendly – she told me to apologise in advance for all the tests she wants to run on you."

Treize sighed. "Lovely." He gave Zechs a look that was a little apologetic. "Really, though, you didn't need to go to that much trouble."

The King smiled gently. "Treize, one phone call does not count as 'trouble', and even if it had, I wouldn't have minded. I want you as comfortable here as we can make you, as quickly as possible, and decent medical provision will play no small part in that." He glanced away, pushing away from his desk and moving to straighten some papers. "It's probably best if you get to know Sally now at any rate, just in case…" He trailed off, not finishing the sentence, and continued to tidy his desk.

The redhead blinked, watching him do it for a minute or two. "Just in case what?" he asked eventually, wondering.

Zechs shrugged. "Just in case." He turned back around a moment later and smiled brightly. "But we can cross that bridge if we come to it. You might well not." He put his head on one side, letting the forced expression fade slightly. "You said that medical care was one of the things you wanted to ask me about this afternoon. What were the others?"

Treize raised an eyebrow, considering. "I have quite a list, actually," he said, deciding not to push for the time being. "But the next most important item would probably be to ask about the state of my finances." He shrugged diffidently. "It's all very well you saying you'll take me shopping," he added, "but can I actually pay for any of this stuff I need, or should I be asking you to lend me the money until I can work out what I'm going to do with myself now?"

"Treize," Zechs replied, his voice mild, "when I said I was taking you shopping, I meant 'I am taking you shopping', not 'I am accompanying you whilst you shop'. There's no question of you paying for any of this yourself. You'll have enough to cope with this afternoon already; I'll handle the financial side of it."

Treize met his friend's gaze and then shook his head. "Ah, I don't think so," he said slowly. "If the situation is such that I can't…"

The blond raised a hand to cut him off. "You can. You simply aren't." He moved around his desk again and sat back down in his chair. "I'm not doing this for charity's sake, my friend," he explained. "I have some very good reasons for it – starting with the fact that you _are_ my friend and you need help."

Treize took a step closer to the desk, his expression set. "That's hardly grounds for…"

Zechs looked at him, then smiled. "Isn't it? All right. If that stings your pride too much, then how about this – I'd be doing nothing for you that your family didn't do for me when you took me in. Consider it repayment of a Royal debt."

"Don't be ridiculous," Treize fired back. "What debt? You were a child, you'd lost everything – do you think my family even noticed the cost of a few sets of clothes and some toys?"

"You make my point for me," Zechs commented quietly, and Treize glared at the comparison.

"I'm hardly a child!" he spat.

Zechs looked at him levelly, the look in his eyes unreadable. "No," he said softly. "You aren't." He searched the younger man's face, seeming to look for something. He looked away again after a few seconds and reached down to a drawer in his desk.

He withdrew a slim, blue folder and held it out to the other man. "The state of your finances as of close of business yesterday," he explained. "I had a feeling you'd ask," he added when Treize seemed taken aback.

"I… thank you," the younger man said, taking the folder.

"Thank Quatre, not me. It was almost the first thing he thought of once we had the DNA tests authenticating your identity back. He's been working on it ever since." Zechs stood up again and made his way to stand by Treize's side. "I'd suggest you leave reading it till this evening, or even tomorrow – it's quite a complex document. The gist of it is that, although Quatre is far from finished with his work, you have enough money that you'll never actually need an income."

Treize glanced up, startled. "Has he made some sort of mistake then? Because in terms of liquid assets, I was never that well off. My day-to-day living expenses were always drawn from my salary; most of the capital I inherited was in the form of solid commodity, or entailed to pay for the upkeep of the family holdings."

Zechs shook his head. "No mistakes. Just some clever number crunching." He shrugged. "There are several sources for the money, actually. Some of it is from bank accounts of yours that have been in stasis since the war, some more from payments released to you by Une on behalf of the various Soldiers Funds and War Pensions she's executor for these days – all money that has been accruing interest for twenty-five years. My Treasury owed most of the rest to you. A lot of what I inherited from you, I poured into the Kingdom when we were struggling to rebuild; that's all been paid back to you, adjusted for inflation and exchange rates. Too, the Crown has been holding and using several assets that are rightfully yours for a good number of years now – property, artwork, plate, that sort of thing. You've been compensated for the loan, and the assets have been released back to you. The figures in there are nowhere near complete, of course – three days hasn't been nearly enough time to start making sense of some of the issues involved. They'll probably at least triple before things are straight – or so Quatre tells me." Zechs shrugged. "One way or another, you have money. I took the liberty of dumping some of it into an account I opened. It's in my name because we don't have a legal identity for you, but I had the bank issue a second card that could be used by 'any member of my household.' You'll find it in the back of the folder."

Treize had been listening to the explanation silently, scanning his eyes over some of the papers in the folder rapidly. He flipped to the back of the folder at Zechs's last words, quickly locating the little data card.

He tugged it free of its slot and then looked down at it blankly. "Zechs, I don't…"

"Recognise the bank card, or the currency?" the blond asked. "You won't. The currency was standardised throughout the ESUN about fifteen years ago. That type of security card is about five years old." He smiled gently. "This would be the other reason why I'm paying for this shopping trip and not you. Even if I couldn't just write off anything we spend as Expenses – which I can – I don't imagine you want to take the time to learn the monetary system and how to use that card before we go shopping?"

Treize stared at the card, trying to familiarize himself with the currency sign. "How does it work?" he asked after a moment of looking.

"How does what work?" Zechs queried. "The card, or the currency?"

"Both," Treize admitted.

The older man shook his head. "I was hoping to save explaining things like that for another day," he began, and was cut off when Treize shook his head.

The redhead looked up at his friend, fingering the small, plastic card uneasily, fingertips brushing over the surface of the inlaid data chip and the raised, embossed sigil in the top left corner that indicated it had been issued by the Royal Bank of the Sanc Kingdom. "I need to know, Zechs. I'm helpless here without information like that."

"I doubt that, Treize," Zechs replied. "You've never been helpless in your life."

The last thing Zechs expected was for Treize to laugh softly, the sound short and jaded. "Have I not?" he asked, and shook his head. "You have no idea." The expression on his face was tinged with bitterness, not something Zechs was familiar with seeing.

The older man put a hand out automatically, reaching to comfort, or soothe, or something that would wash that look away. Boredom, hostility, contempt, cunning, condescension, even a certain amount of cynicism – those were all expressions Zechs was familiar with Treize displaying, but not bitterness, never bitterness. That was a feeling that had been reserved exclusively for him. It made him take a close look at his old commander, seeing fine lines at the corners of his eyes that belied his youth, and a tightness to the set of his mouth and shoulders that was completely new to Zechs's experience of him.

It was enough to remind the blond that, although he'd been counting the time of Treize's 'death' from the Christmas Eve he'd apparently died on, the two of them had actually been apart some time longer, having not seen each other – or even really spoken – since Zechs had run from Oz in the August of 195. The topic of that separation was another one of the hundreds that had yet to be raised between the two of them, and Zechs had been regarding it as of less importance than many others – one to be dealt with sometime in the future when they had a quiet evening and nothing else more significant to handle.

He was forced to wonder now whether that was another thing he needed to rethink. Treize hadn't raised the topic either but something must have happened in those four long months to grant him the expression he was wearing; whatever it was, it hadn't been in any of the accounts of that time Zechs had read. Neither his resignation, his house arrest, nor his return to power should have had that effect on the younger man.

"Treize…?" he questioned, settling his hand over the one the redhead was holding the folder with.

The former general remained still for a moment, then looked up and banished everything else behind a bright smile. "I'm sorry," he apologised. "I've gotten rather a tendency for introspection lately. Feel free to snap me out of it if I do it again."

Zechs nodded his assent, caught off guard and feeling unsure of what to do next.

Treize solved that problem for him, too. "If I promise not to ask too many questions, will you explain the currency and the card to me on the drive into the city?" he asked coaxingly.

The blond couldn't help but smile. "Of course I will." He took the folder back from the younger man, freed the card from its slot and passed it back to Treize, and then tossed the folder onto his desk. "Shall we, then? If I'm remembering your shopping habits correctly, one afternoon isn't going to be nearly long enough!"

"Hey!"

The good-natured protest from Treize was accompanied by a light shove from one hand – a gesture Zechs used shamelessly as he caught the younger man's hand and wrapped it firmly in his own as he pulled and drew Treize into a light hug.

He released him a moment later and danced out of the way of the next chiding slap aimed in his direction, before turning to the door and inviting the red head to follow him with a winning smile.

"You haven't lost your reaction time, then," Treize commented as he drew level again.

"Very little of it," Zechs admitted. "This way," he gestured.


	8. Chapter 8

Zechs watched with a small smile as Treize skimmed the menu of the restaurant he'd been dragged into. Despite Treize's protestations that he still wasn't hungry, Zechs had insisted on them eating before they did anything – and as he'd expected, the wonderful range of smells emanating from the kitchens and from the plates of other diners seemed to have changed the redhead's mind enough that he was at least reading the menu with serious intent.

Predictably enough, too, Treize had barraged Zechs with questions on their drive to the city, quizzing the King on every subject from the currency to current events to try and force some sort of bearing on himself should he need it. The former general had seemed both pleased and quite taken aback at the depth of thought Zechs had already put into the task of getting him acclimated. He'd been thrilled at learning that measures were already in place to bring him up to speed with things such as the monetary system, and surprisingly upset when Zechs had told him he would have to learn to modify the way he moved and spoke.

As Aleks had jokingly pointed out, Treize looked and sounded and moved exactly like himself, military leader and professional politician. For a man his age, born when he would have been, his posture was too perfect, his speech too formal, his self-discipline too rigid – no twenty four year old behaved that way anymore, and so neither could he if he wasn't to give himself away.

One of the first things Zechs had suggested was that Treize needed to drop the elocution-lesson-drilled way he talked. In the time that had passed, Zechs had picked up more than a hint of his native accent to his English, Aleks's voice was lilting with it, and even Dorothy had reverted to hinting at her Catalan origins. National identity had become important, Zechs had tried to explain, as the ESUN sought to repair the differences between colonist and Terran. No longer were people grouped by being born on Earth or in one of the five colony groups – instead the designations L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5 were always followed by the exact colony number, and those from Earth identified their home nation before anything, as they would have centuries before. Border controls were back, native languages were being taught in schools and spoken in homes – it was the complete antithesis of what Relena had originally proposed but it was working. Some laws were standardised, and the currency was Sphere-wide, but other than that, countries and colonies ruled themselves.

Unfortunately, that meant that Treize's cultivated, carefully accent-less English was something that had to go. Nobody spoke that way anymore; most children had never even heard it outside of history classes. Even if General Khushrenada's speaking voice wasn't rather well known, it would draw too much attention, so after fifteen years of making himself suppress his childhood accent, Treize would have to learn to speak with it again at all times, and not just when he was tired or upset.

Privately, Zechs wasn't too upset by that change – he'd always loved the natural rolling lilt of his friend's voice. He'd conducted entire conversations in French with the man in previous years just to hear it.

He was doing the same now. As a way of forcing him back into the habit, Zechs had refused to talk to Treize in anything other than the general's native language from the moment they'd left the palace, despite the younger man's protests that Zechs's butchery of the tongue was giving him a headache.

Treize chose that moment to look up at Zechs and smile. "I concede. I'm perhaps hungrier than I wanted to admit," he acknowledged, gesturing apologetically.

Zechs smiled back. "I thought you might be. As I said, I've never known anyone not be able to eat here. I've been trying to get their head chef to come and work at the Palace for years now, but he says that would be selfish of him, and that everyone should experience his cooking." He shrugged. "He's probably right."

Treize chuckled softly. "He's probably right in thinking that making you come to him here is very good for his business," he teased.

"That, too," Zechs admitted. "Have you decided?"

Treize shook his head. "My first meal in twenty five years – I confess I'm having some trouble deciding."

The blond rolled his eyes. "Let me choose for you, then?" he offered, and was glad when Treize nodded immediately.

"It might be faster," the redhead admitted.

Zechs smiled again and turned to place two orders with the waiter that was approaching the table, deliberately switching into Sancian to do it so that his friend wouldn't know what he was getting until it arrived. He turned back to see Treize watching him with fond amusement, obviously onto the trick.

Something about the expression made Zechs catch his breath a little; he'd thought he'd remembered what it felt like to have Treize looking at him like that, but he knew now he'd been wrong. Without thinking, he put a hand out across the table and brushed his fingers against the other man's. "Treize," he murmured, his eyes flickering back and forward as he studied his friend.

The younger man raised an eyebrow at the scrutiny but he didn't move, giving his silent approval to the contact between them.

It was enough to make Zechs feel a little daring. "Treize," he said again, his voice low and soft. "May I kiss you?"

Surprise flared in midnight eyes, the expression in them becoming a little diffident and protective. "If you'd like to," Treize allowed after a moment. Only Zechs's familiarity with him let the blond read the shades in his tone that indicated uncertainty and nervousness, rather than disapproval.

Keeping his gaze locked with his friend's, Zechs leaned into him across the narrow width of the table separating them. He watched as Treize's dark eyes flashed with a swirl of emotions; longing and hope and want for what Zechs was offering, but also fear and uneasiness.

Zechs let his gaze flick from his friend's to skim the rest of his face and the line of his body, noting that Treize was holding completely still, every muscle seemingly relaxed. There was nothing on the younger man's face to indicate anything but perfect acceptance, but, shadowed in the back of the gaze that met Zechs's when he looked back up, hidden behind all the other emotions, was a thread of mistrust.

It stung, and it made the older man still in place, his eyes holding the other man's until the former general began to frown a little.

"Zechs?" Treize queried softly, his tone full of puzzlement. "Have you changed your mind?"

Zechs shook his head slowly. "No," he answered, as quietly as Treize had asked. Gently, he caught up the hand he'd covered with his own and lifted it to brush his lips across cold fingers. "No," he repeated. "I'd like to, but you wouldn't." He found a small smile and shook his head again. "Don't let me bully you," he instructed softly.

Treize glanced down at his hand, then pulled it from Zechs's carefully. "I won't," he replied. His fingers curled and his other hand came up to grip the first, shielding it as though protecting an injury. He opened his mouth to say something else, and stopped himself when he caught sight of the waiter approaching the table with a full tray.

A swift shake of his head seemed to serve in place of whatever the rest of his statement had been, leaving Zechs to puzzle over what his friend might have said as they began working on their meals and resumed a less personal line of conversation.

* * *

Despite the quarter of a century that had passed since he'd last seen Treize, Zechs had thought he'd remembered the other man relatively well.

An hour into their shopping trip, though, and the King was realising that he'd either forgotten more about Treize than he thought, or else he'd simply not known the man as well as he'd presumed he did.

The blond had been teasing when he'd made the crack about one afternoon not being enough time for Treize to go shopping, but there had been a real element of truth to the statement as well. The former general was, after all, looking at replacing every single thing he'd ever owned – something Zechs didn't actually expect to do in one day and not least because it was Treize he was shopping with.

The Treize of Zechs's memories had been a self-admitted hedonist with a borderline addiction to shopping. By the age of ten, Zechs had been well used to spending entire days being dragged from one shop to another with his friend, hopping from designer boutiques to army surplus stores and back again endlessly as the senior Cadet bemoaned the shortness of the Academy breaks. By thirteen, Zechs had learned to enjoy the trips as the one occasion that Instructor Treize could be guaranteed to be happy and affectionate, and not the stern teacher.

By his own later teens, Zechs had come to regard such shopping trips as foreplay, actively liking the time he spent indulging his commander's obsession, having finally realised that Treize adored being shopped for and that there was something wonderfully intimate and almost erotic in dressing the older man. That afternoons of shopping usually led to evenings spent at the theatre or over lingering dinners, which then led to nights spent curled up in bed together, was no small part of the attraction.

On the basis of that, the prospect of an entire day where he was free to wander to his heart's content around shops he'd never seen before, with an entire wardrobe to purchase and an unlimited budget for the first time in his life, should have had Treize bouncing off the walls with happiness. Zechs had been looking forward to watching his reactions, secretly hoping to recapture some of the feelings of those earlier trips, and more publicly hoping that a few hours doing something he'd always enjoyed would help Treize feel more grounded, even as having his own wardrobe would plant the first subtle seeds of belonging.

Treize had seemed interested in the idea before lunch but it had quickly become clear that he wasn't enjoying himself at all. Contrary to Zechs's expectations of enthusiastic dashing about, Treize was still wandering rather aimlessly through the first of the big department stores Zechs had suggested would be a good place to start. He'd made almost no purchases so far, managing to buy only one or two rather boring but necessary items before he'd seemed to stall and slide into his funk.

Occasionally, he'd pause in his steady meandering to reach out and touch something, rubbing the fabric between his fingertips, but then he'd let it drop back to where it had started and carry on moving.

The listlessness was making Zechs worry. It was possible, he knew, that it was too soon and that Treize had already dealt with enough to wear him out for the day, but somehow, Zechs didn't think so. There was set to the pale face and the slim body that was suggesting a more complex cause.

Watching as Treize went through his aimless feel-and-abandon routine again, Zechs took a deep breath and closed the gap he'd left between the two of them. "Are you all right?" he asked quietly, searching the younger man's gaze when Treize turned his head to look up at him. The sapphire eyes were completely empty for the first few seconds, the expression distant, and then Treize gave a helpless little shrug and shook his head with a rueful smile.

"I'm sorry," he offered. "I'm being rather boring, aren't I? No doubt you were expecting me to be halfway to heaven by now."

Zechs put his head on one side. "I'd expected a shade more enthusiasm, I have to admit," he agreed, answering the smile gently with his own. "But as long as the only problem is you being completely indecisive, I'll live. What are you doing, master planning your entire wardrobe in your head and seeing how long it takes to make my feet hurt?"

Treize made some small, noncommittal noise in his throat. "Unfortunately not," he replied. "Though the idea has some merit."

Zechs laughed softly. "I'm sure it does." He leaned lightly against one of the displays, keeping his eyes on his friend. "What is the problem, then? If you've had enough for the day, you can say so. I thought you'd enjoy this but if you're too tired for it, I understand. You do look rather washed out."

The redhead looked away, shrugging again. "I'm not tired. I feel a little sick, if you want total honesty, which probably explains my colour but it's not…" he trailed off, glancing around himself as he gestured feebly. "I just… don't really know where to start."

The King had pushed himself up from his casual posture at Treize's admission of not feeling well, but it was his last words that made the blond frown. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Just what I said." Treize sighed softly. "Where do I start, Miri? I get the impression that I own absolutely nothing at all, which one would think would make this easier, but I know nothing about the environment I'm living in, nothing about what I'm going to be expected to do in the next few days and how I should dress for it. Even if I did, it wouldn't do me much good. I can't read the labels on any of these clothes," he admitted.

Zechs's expression showed open surprise before he glanced down at the pile of shirts nearest to him and realised the mistake he'd made. He'd thought to warn Treize about the resurrection of national languages, but he'd completely overlooked the rest of what that meant for the younger man. Zechs might have been using his native Sancian dialect again for more than twenty years but, from Treize's perspective, the language had been dead for more than fifteen.

From the day the Sanc Kingdom had fallen, its language had gone underground just as much as the survivors had, barely even spoken between families for fear of it becoming the key to their discovery. Zechs could recall occasionally using the odd word or two in front of Treize – mostly when he was very young or when they were both blind drunk – but the chances were that those few instances were the redhead's total exposure to the tongue. Certainly, there was no hope of him being able to read it when Zechs himself had needed to put in some formal study to do so on his ascension to his throne.

Cursing himself silently, Zechs turned the nearest label over in his hands, glancing over the mix of Cyrillic and Roman characters that gave Sancian its unique sound and advertised the country's origins so heavily. It was utterly familiar to the King now but it hadn't always been and he swore again mentally as he tried to remember if Treize even knew any of the Slavonic languages. If he didn't, then he would have to learn Sancian from the alphabet up and practically word-by-word – the characters representing each individual letter changed between the two alphabets almost randomly depending on the phrase – and it was more than likely that he would never manage more than a few awkward sentences. Not something that would improve his feeling of being at home.

"I don't suppose," Zechs began lightly, quirking an eyebrow as he fought to keep the importance of the answer from showing in his tone, "that you speak any Russian or Polish or some such, do you? I know it's not likely but…." He stopped as Treize stared at him blankly. "What?" he asked.

"Not likely?" Treize demanded shortly. "With my surname?" he continued disbelievingly.

Zechs shrugged. "You're French," he answered. "Both of your parents were French. I know your name isn't but neither is mine particularly Sancian, so I never really paid it much mind." He tilted his head. "Especially since I can't recall you ever using anything but French and English."

Treize shook his head slowly. "I speak fluent Russian, Zechs," he corrected softly. "I always have. I even hold titles and property in the country." He frowned, looking puzzled. "I thought you knew that. I could have sworn you'd heard the story at least once. My father's family were White Russian aristocrats originally, who fled to Paris in the Bolshevik revolution. They're as French as anyone else there is now, but they've never forgotten their roots." He bit his lip. "I'm sure I told you that."

"You probably did," Zechs agreed. "Once over. It's been a while," he reminded. "Do you read the language as well? If you know the Cyrillic alphabet, you're going to find Sancian a lot easier to get a handle on."

Treize winced at the reminder of the time that had passed for Zechs, his gaze cutting away to fix on the floor instead. "Could you just translate for me, please?" he asked, and his tone was disturbingly uncertain. "I can read Cyrillic perfectly, but I don't think I can learn a new language in one afternoon. I'm not…."

"I'm not asking you to learn Sancian this afternoon!" Zechs spluttered, interrupting whatever Treize had been about to add. "Good God! That wasn't what I was thinking at all." Without thinking about it, the King reached out and rested a hand on Treize's shoulder. "No, of course I'll translate for you, and gladly, though I'll be surprised if you don't pick up the odd word here and there by the time we're done." He squeezed lightly with his hand, bending his head enough that he could catch Treize's eyes with his own, and found himself reacting straight from his parental instincts at the expression in them.

The younger man's gaze was lost and frightened, clearly overwhelmed. It reminded Zechs so strongly of Aleks's when he'd been told Noin was dead that the King found himself looking at Treize in a different light.

The King had no way to know it but his reaction was almost identical to that Dorothy had experienced in his morning room. For the first time since Treize's arrival, Zechs looked at him and saw, not the confident officer of his memories, but a young man who was barely an adult, who was only a few years older than Zechs's own son was.

The vulnerability both touched something in Zechs and made him wince at his own lack of understanding. Shaking his head, he tightened his grip and said firmly, "I shouldn't have asked you to do this today. It's too much for you."

He waited for Treize to look up at him again and forced a reassuring smile. "You really have no clue, do you?" he asked. "Look, a lot of the reason I brought you here this afternoon was that Sally Po suggested that you might start to feel as though you belong here faster if you aren't borrowing everything from other people all the time." He shrugged lightly. "I happened to agree with her – I think it would help. Would you mind a suggestion?"

Treize blinked hesitantly. "What?" he asked carefully.

"Start by replacing what you're wearing at the moment."

Zechs smiled warmly when the younger man opened his mouth to protest, holding up his free hand to check him before he started. "I mean that literally," he said. "I want you to substitute it all item for item. There's nothing wrong with the outfit in terms of what you're going to be doing for the rest of the day, but you obviously hate the colour of the sweater, the trousers aren't exactly a perfect fit and those shoes have to be hurting your feet. I'll leave off mentioning what I'm sure you think of the underwear and such," the King added impishly and relaxed when he got a twitch of an answering smile from his friend.

"Would that suit you?" he asked. "It'll only take half an hour or so to replace what you have on with something similar that you actually like," he coaxed. "If you're up to it when you're done, this place has a café on the top floor. You could borrow the restroom to get changed and we could sit over a cup of coffee for a while and see how you feel. If you want to, I'll rustle up a pen and paper and we can give some thought to what else you might want to buy today. If not, we can have the drink and then simply go home. You can always come back another day." Zechs gave Treize another warm smile. "Even if I'm not free, I'm sure Felix will be happy to come with you. Or Aleks."

The younger man, who had been taking all of Zechs's abrupt burst of planning in with a mix of surprise and patience, suddenly raised an eyebrow and nodded. "All right," he agreed quietly, then added, "What is he like?"

The King frowned. "What's who like?" he asked.

"Felix." Treize shrugged. "He's family, I suppose. I should like to know something about him."

Zechs blinked, taken rather aback, then took a step away from the shelf he was hovering next to when a middle-aged woman dropped him a polite curtsey as she reached for something, reminding him of how long he and Treize had been standing in the same place as they talked. "That's right," Zechs replied, half to himself, "he is. I hadn't realised that until just now. How silly of me!"

He gestured towards the middle of the store, keeping his pace slow enough to allow Treize to glance across the displays as they moved and noting with relief that the younger man actually seemed to have some interest in them now. Apparently, at least the first part of his plan for the rest of the day had met with approval. "Being Doro's son makes him your nephew, doesn't it?"

"My cousin twice removed, technically," Treize corrected absently. "Dors isn't actually my niece – it was 'Uncle Treize' only because nobody could get her to sit still long enough to explain how we were actually related when she was little."

Zechs chuckled, nodding. "Well, whatever the reasoning, I'd run with the theme when it comes to Felix. It'll be less bewildering that way. If Felix takes to addressing you as his uncle, then Aleks will as well and the rest of us won't have to spend the next ten years double checking whether it's you or Felix he's speaking to." He watched as Treize brushed his fingertips over a soft grey sweater, smiling when the redhead let his hand linger after the first contact.

"I can't call Felix my nephew, Zechs," Treize protested as he picked the jumper up to look at it more closely. "He's less than three years my junior in age. It would be ridiculous!"

"Better ridiculous than infuriating." The King reached out and caught the tag in his hand, reading it quickly. "It should fit you well enough and you still have excellent taste," he offered, then switched back to topic. "The boys are bad enough with the whole 'cousin' thing now. They took up using it for each other a few years ago – a typical adolescent posing sort of a thing – and it's stuck. If they start including you in it as well, it'll be completely confusing."

Treize was still petting the sweater lightly. "Aleks called me cousin when he thought I was Felix, so I knew they used it. Why, though? Unless it's some notion of a mockery of the old aristocrat's standard form of address when you can't remember who the hell you're talking to."

"Probably part of it," Zechs agreed. "But I think it has more to do with the fact that they actually are."

"Are what?" Treize asked. His eyes were still on the sweater, looking it over with intense scrutiny, turning it in the electric lighting of the shop to see what it did to the colour.

"Cousins," the King replied and reached over to snag the jumper from Treize's hand. "It's lovely. Go find something to go with it," he ordered.

Treize looked up at the older man in surprise and Zechs wasn't sure whether it was because he'd stolen the sweater or because of what he'd said. "How are they cousins?" Treize asked after a moment of staring blankly at his appropriated item of clothing. "And if you're about to tell me that Noin was somehow Dorothy's sister," he added, "then I'm sorry, but you've all made a mistake."

The flat certainty of the former general's tone made Zechs laugh, not a little in relief. Fully half of everything Treize had ever said had been delivered in that tone of voice – calm, convinced, just defying the listener to challenge him – but it was the first time Zechs had heard it from the younger man since his arrival in morning room. Its continued absence had been a worry the blond had barely been aware of.

"Nothing to do with Noin, I promise," he chuckled. "Did you never look at Doro and me and wonder? We found out a few years ago that her mother and mine were cousins. Turns out that half the reason Weyridge had it in for Dermail so badly during the War, was because they were half-brothers. Weyridge apparently felt as though Dermail had taken the title and position that should have been his, and Dermail never got over the fact that Weyridge had married his daughter to my father." Zechs shrugged. "Made little real difference to anyone other than the boys, but they loved the fact that they were actual blood relations rather than just informal adopted ones."

"Well, it explains a lot," Treize commented after a few moments. "Where did you find the information?"

"Weyridge told Relena just before he died. His mother had an affair with the older Dermail and never told anyone until her husband was dead and Weyridge had inherited all the husband's titles and what have you." Zechs gestured idly, giving a chuckle of a laugh that lacked any real humour. "Weyridge himself just never quite got past the fact that he was a fraud, and when he confronted Dermail with the fact that he had a claim to the Dermail Duchy, Dermail laughed in his face."

Treize shook his head at that. "I wonder if he'd have reacted differently if he'd known how things were going to turn out. At least Weyridge would have been an heir to the estate from the same branch of the family."

"Oh, probably," Zechs agreed. "Not that it would have made much difference in the end – Weyridge only had one child and that was my mother." He glanced sideways at the younger man, curiously. "I wondered if you'd known, actually. You helped settle his estate, didn't you?"

"Yes. As both Dermail's nephew and his granddaughter's guardian, I had the interest and the right. I had to go back five generations to find a legal male heir for the title. Weyridge could have made my job a lot easier if he'd come forward, though I suspect Dors wouldn't have come out if it nearly so well off if he had." Treize shook his head. "I had no idea at all. I suspect my mother did, though. It would certainly explain a few things if she had known."

Zechs let his face show his surprise. "Oh? Such as?" he asked, touching Treize's arm to steer the younger man in the right direction.

"You, for one thing. Our fathers' ongoing 'honoured enemy' relations aside, my parent's explanation that they owed you protection as one noble family to another never did pass muster as justification for the risk they ran when they took you in. If my mother knew Weyridge was really her brother and she told my father that, he would have insisted on protecting you. He always was obsessive about family."

That was an understatement. Lysander Khushrenada had considered the concept of family utterly sacrosanct; even the least important, most distant cousin had only had to ask his help to have him move heaven and earth for them. Blood kin, he had said in Zechs's hearing more than once, were worth everything one owned and more and he had proved it over and over again, especially with his son. Treize had been groomed and polished with exhausting intensity by his father, perfection demanded in everything he did. Only the fact that he had been spoiled and cosseted in equal measure had made it at all acceptable.

Zechs had formulated his own theories over the years as to why the elder Khushrenada had behaved that way – he'd been looking forward to being able to ask Treize if he was right, now – especially since he hadn't been nearly so harsh with the young orphan he'd let into his home. In fact, most of the time, Zechs had gotten the impression that Lysander barely knew he existed.

Treize chuckling softly drew Zechs from his thoughts. "What?" he asked, catching the mischievous hint to the sound.

"You're right to worry about Aleks taking to addressing me as cousin," Treize said, still smiling. "And I don't think you're going to be able to stop him."

"Why?" Zechs enquired warily – he hadn't been joking about how annoyingly confusing it was going to be.

"Because I am," Treize answered, "and I suspect he's intelligent enough to use it. I am precisely as related to him as I am to Felix."

The King blinked as he took that in, then stopped walking almost mid-step and stared at the younger man in astonishment. "I beg your pardon?" he asked blankly.

Treize stopped as well, making the half turn he needed to face the other man smoothly. His face was still lit by the impish smile. "You hadn't realised?" he queried. "If my mother was Marquis Weyridge's sister, then your mother was my cousin and Aleks is my cousin-twice-removed, just like Felix is. Dors isn't going to be happy with you," he added, almost as an afterthought.

Zechs shook his head in bewilderment. "I employ people to deal with this sort of thing, Treize. I don't begin to follow it. Why isn't Doro going to be happy with me?"

Treize shifted his weight from one foot to another and folded one arm to rest his hand on his hip, his fingers reaching to play with the hilt of a sword that wasn't there in a reflexive movement Zechs didn't miss. "You said this morning that Felix is in Bordeaux until the end of the month, inspecting the family estates," he explained. "The only property any of us owned in that part of France were my mother's dowry-lands, which is why I said I was glad someone was looking after the place – she was very fond of them. Dorothy had no Khushrenada blood, so most of my estate she had no claim to, but she was my heir for everything I inherited solely from my mother."

Zechs winced visibly. "Ah, Treize…" he started, wondering how to phrase what he had to say. This was, most assuredly, not how he had wanted to break this particular bit of news, but if Treize was going to start trying to tackle the subject of his property and titles so quickly, then the older man had no choice.

Treize either missed the reaction, or took it to mean something else entirely than it did. "Yes," he continued. "Or so I thought. I was wrong. If Weyridge was my mother's brother as you say, then you and Dors are both equally related to me, and to my mother. Even amongst families like mine, who are old enough to allow both genders to inherit, the male line takes precedence. Dors isn't my rightful heir – you are." He frowned suddenly. "And if the people you have working for you to 'deal with this sort of thing' didn't realise that, then you need new people. Those estates should have become Crown property. For a monarchy that was struggling financially to not realise that was a serious oversight. Most of my private income came from the vineyards on those lands."

Zechs kept his gaze fixed on Treize for a few seconds, then closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. "You're going to wreak havoc in my household, aren't you?" he asked wistfully.

Treize snorted and Zechs didn't need to see his expression to know how contemptuous it would be. "If all your Staff is that sloppy, then, yes, I probably am." His voice softened. "Presuming you don't mind, of course," he added hesitantly.

The King smiled gently as he opened his eyes again. "No, I won't mind – if you'll do me a favour?"

"What?"

"Train Aleks the way you were. If you had any idea how many times I thought 'Treize would have known…' in the first few years I was King…" He sighed. "I was never taught how to run a household, never mind a country. I didn't know how to balance a bank account until you showed me after I left the Academy. Relena grew up very well off, but not nobility, so she had no idea, either. We neither of us had a clue."

Treize frowned, looking puzzled. "Surely there were people other than me you could have asked? I know there were parts of my education that were rather specialised but I'm hardly the only one of my background in the world."

"The difficulty was finding someone I could trust, that was actually willing to speak to me," Zechs admitted, "I was understandably not popular for a while."

Treize laughed. "Scorching half of the Pacific Ocean out of existence will have that effect," he commented dryly, referring to the shot Zechs had taken at the planet. His expression was light and amused, but it faded out slowly when the older man shook his head.

"You don't know the half of it," Zechs sighed wearily. "And I'll tell you some other time," he added, seeing Treize's face shift into curiosity.

"All right," Treize agreed, wondering what he'd missed. It occurred to him suddenly that he didn't actually know when the war had ended – it could very well be wishful thinking on his part that had made his Epyon-gotten images seem as though it hadn't been long after his 'death.' "Why didn't you ask Dorothy for help?" he asked, shaking his head to clear it as thoughts of the red suit made the insidious whispering tickle at the edges of his mind again. "Or Une? They would both have known everything I did."

"They did help, to some extent." Zechs shrugged, starting the two of them walking again and steering the younger man with another light touch. "But Une was already overwhelmingly busy with the Preventers, and with her own affairs, and Doro…" The King sighed softly. "Our relationship was a little… awkward for a few years after the war. It wasn't really until Felix was born, and then Aleks, that we had much to do with each other again, and not until Noin died that we repaired our friendship. She moved into the Palace to help me raise him," he explained. "We needed an adult who wasn't coming apart at the seams the way Relena and I were."

Remembered pain echoed in the blonde's voice; his face was shadowed by it. Treize didn't really need to ask to know Noin's death had hit hard but he found himself doing so anyway.

"Was it so bad?" he asked, as gently as he could manage, reaching to touch the older man's arm, to offer what comfort he could.

Zechs shot him a sidelong glance, frowning. "She was my wife, Treize. The mother of my son." He shook his head. "I don't think you can understand what that means." He let silence stretch between them for a few moments. "Yes, it was bad," he continued eventually. "Shattering, actually. It almost ripped the family apart completely. Helping my son put flowers on his mother's coffin was the most soul-destroying thing I've ever had to do."

Treize flinched. He hadn't realised Noin and Zechs had been married – though he should have, given their son was apparently uncontested as Sanc's Crown Prince – and the blonde's words were conjuring images that were altogether too realistic for comfort. Unaccountably, he found he felt guilty, and he put his hand out again. "I'm sorry," he offered helplessly.

Zechs shrugged brusquely. "What for?" he asked. "You weren't here."

That, Treize realised as Zechs picked up his pace and led him into what looked like a shoe department, was what he'd been apologising for.


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: I don't often do this, but here's to official Zechs/Treize month... it's 6/13!_

_Also, for anyone who is curious, to see pictures of 'the Moggy...' google '1958 4/4 series 2 morgan in blue' on Images, and you'll gt piccies!_

_Ginny_

* * *

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.

As Zechs had hoped he would, with a cup of hot coffee in him and wearing a set of clothes that he'd picked himself, Treize rediscovered his love of shopping, and it was the King himself who called a halt to their spending spree several hours later.

By that time, Treize had managed to garner himself a decent basis of a wardrobe – enough to tide him through the next few days at least – as well as one or two more interesting and unusual items he'd picked up simply because.

Also in that time, Zechs had remembered that his friend had an obsession with close fitting sweaters, learned that he almost always wore boots because he found it hard to find shoes that fit comfortably and despaired at how extraordinarily, exasperatingly fussy he was when it came to his more personal items.

In the end, the King had been forced to drag his friend away from the clothes stores, promising to let Treize come back soon. He'd pled boredom – and it was true – but Zechs had also been conscious of a second reason for stopping where they did and he made a silent promise to himself to include at least one of either Aleks or Felix in the next expedition.

The former general had always had – and still did have – exquisite taste in his wardrobe, seeming to know instinctively what would look good on him and what wouldn't, but what he didn't have was a grasp on modern standards of fashion. As the afternoon had worn on, Zechs had realised that Treize was choosing a lot of items based on his familiarity with their styles, choosing to avoid the newer trends he didn't know. It wasn't a bad plan – casual, understated elegance in men's dressing just didn't change that much – but it had flaws. One was that the redhead was dressing with an eye to the military protocol he'd obeyed for half his life and choosing very little that was truly casual, especially in the more relaxed climate he was in now.

The other was that, by veering to cuts and colours that he would have bought on any other day, he was choosing styles that were twenty-five years out of date. Treize was running the risk of looking middle-aged before his time, or of looking like he'd borrowed his father's clothes – hence Zechs's decision to enlist the help of his younger relatives, who would be able to guide the former general in selecting the more fashionable clothes he would need to really blend in.

Of course, clothes shops hadn't been the only places Treize had insisted on visiting. Once banned from any more clothes, they'd also spent time in a bookstore, where Treize had bought a bewildering range of titles, fiction and non-fiction both, an electronics shop, where he'd trawled through computers and components until Zechs had suggested he'd be better talking to Heero first and a music retailers, so he could purchase both sheet and pre-recorded music. To Zechs's utter amusement, given Treize's ranting about the subject over breakfast that morning, there had also been half an hour in a little understated boutique shop for Treize to select all his own toiletries from scratch – including the signature cologne he'd always worn and which Zechs had never, until that moment, known the name of.

The only point of disagreement in the entire afternoon had come when Treize had asked Zechs where he could find an armourer and a gunsmith. The King's response that he still had Treize's duelling sabre had been met with a delighted smile, but the refusal to allow the younger man to carry a gun had not gone down nearly so well.

Treize had been wearing his service pistol in the Tallgeese, so the weapon didn't actually need replacing, but Zechs had calmly informed his former commander that he couldn't have it back, and certainly couldn't carry it around with him everywhere as he always had done. It was locked in the Palace armoury and it would stay there, until and unless Treize took up a profession that granted him both a gun licence and a carrying permit for it.

Since that almost exclusively meant the younger man joining the Preventers, under Une's command, Zechs suspected that the pistol would be staying locked up for quite some time.

Treize had protested, quite vehemently, but Zechs had refused to be budged. Very few people outside the Preventers could, or even wanted to, own a gun anymore and practically no-one Treize's age had even seen a gun outside a museum, much less fired one. That his familiarity with the weapon would make Treize stand out from his peers horribly was one of Zechs's objections. The other was that the penalties for illegal ownership and use of a gun were frighteningly severe.

The argument had become quite heated, with Treize first becoming angry and then rather upset at his friend's continual denial. Zechs had cut it dead in the end by simply telling Treize to 'take it up with Une' as the only person with the authority to grant him the permission he needed.

It had taken the older man almost another hour to understand that Treize's protest was caused by the dent his self-confidence had just taken. Not only was Zechs asking him to walk around unable to defend himself for the first time in ten years – something that had to be frightening in the strange surroundings – but he was also telling the former general that his only profession was obsolete, the visual symbol of it an anachronism.

The insight had made Zechs reach out to Treize to comfort. He'd slid his arm around the younger man's waist, pulling him close, and realised when Treize leaned into him willingly that it really was time to call a halt altogether.

The King had guided the redhead back to the car, deposited all the various bags into the boot, and, pausing only to exchange glances with the Preventer Agent who'd been silently trailing them all afternoon, started the drive back to the Palace.

They hadn't been driving ten minutes before Treize fell asleep.

Pulling to a halt at a set of traffic lights, Zechs pressed the switch that would tilt the passenger seat back, watching as the younger man's body settled into a more comfortable posture, his head to one side as he breathed evenly and his hands gathered lightly in his lap. There was no question that Treize was soundly asleep. He barely stirred at the movement, and didn't at all when the King stroked a gentle hand over his hair.

"You might have said you were tired," Zechs chided, his voice no more than a whisper. "Silly man."

His only response was a faint murmur and it made him smile indulgently. Treize had always been a light and rather restless sleeper, not usually in bed more than four or five hours a night. It made a nice change to see him really under, without him being truly unconscious.

The lights changed and Zechs turned his attention back to the road, being careful to keep his driving as smooth as possible.

He put his foot down a little on the approach road to the palace, knowing that he was unlikely to encounter other traffic. The public weren't allowed vehicles this close to the grounds and the staff were in the middle of a shift.

The presence of other cars on the courtyard of the Palace, their doors and boots open whilst the porters unloaded them, told Zechs that there had been new arrivals during his absence. One little sports car in particular made him smile – Felix Maxwell had combined his father's love of machines and his mother's love of luxury into an obsession with classic cars. Zechs had never seen the lovely little number parked in front of his main door before but he had no doubt about its owner.

Turning to his passenger as the senior footman noticed their arrival, Zechs clasped Treize's shoulder in his hand lightly and shook him. "Treize? Treize, you need to wake up."

The younger man opened his eyes blearily, blinked, and then sat up as he took in his surroundings. "Oh, I'm sorry…" he began as he realised he'd been asleep for the entire journey home, and Zechs cut him off with a smile.

"Don't apologise. You obviously needed it." He gestured out of the windscreen and watched Treize's face change as he spotted the car. "As you can see, we've got guests."

The King opened his door and slid out onto the gravel, nodding to the footman with a smile of thanks and an instruction to see that all the bags were delivered to Treize's rooms. Treize himself climbed out of the car a moment later and began making his way over to the sports car without even pausing long enough to stretch.

Shaking his head fondly, Zechs followed him and stayed a pace or two back as Treize walked around the car slowly.

"Yours?" Treize asked, and there was something close to hope in his tone.

Zechs shook his head. "I'm afraid not. I don't have much time for cars unless they break down on me." He smiled at the mixed look of disappointment and incomprehension on his friend's face. "I'm not actually completely sure who it belongs to," he explained. "Though I can take a good guess."

"She's beautiful," Treize breathed raptly, putting one hand out to touch and stopping before he made contact.

"Isn't she, though?"

The new voice made both men turn their heads to the speaker, looking up the sweeping white stone steps that stretched from the courtyard to the doors. A tall young man was standing on the top of them, posed just under the overhanging balcony.

He came towards them as soon as he saw he had their attention, his stride light and graceful down the steps, his hand outstretched in an offer to shake as soon as he was within reach.

Zechs took it, using it to pull the younger man into a brief hug of welcome before letting him go completely and putting one hand on his shoulder. "Inspecting the estates wasn't the only thing you were doing in Bordeaux, then?" he asked lightly.

He won himself a musical laugh. "Clearly not. I could hardly resist, though, now could I? She's a lovely little thing and she runs like a dream."

The King rolled his eyes in affectionate exasperation. "What did your mother say?" he asked.

"Oh, she doesn't know yet. I said hello but she's in the middle of dressing for dinner." The younger man gave an airy wave of his hand. "I'm not worried. I shan't have to tell her, after all – my father will go into rhapsodies the moment he sees the car and she'll learn about it from him."

"Devious child," Zechs chuckled. "What are you doing here, anyway? We weren't expecting you for another week."

"And I'm terribly sorry for imposing myself early, but I was given to understand that there'd been some excitement. Certainly, I'm not used to half-hysterical phone calls from my mother." The younger man gave a tight shrug. "I'm rather afraid I reacted without thinking by packing a bag, tossing it into the car and putting my foot down. By the time I got Aleks to make any sense, I was halfway to Berlin."

Zechs shook his head. "Speed limits, dear boy," he commented.

"Are all well and good, but you and I both know I can ignore them quite safely. If I could have gotten an answer from any of your household except my mother and Aleks, I might not have felt it so necessary to panic."

Treize watched as Zechs raised an eyebrow, then winced in realisation. "Ah," the King replied. "It should have occurred to me that Doro would have called you. I am sorry. I can only say that we were all rather busy."

"So I gathered," the younger man answered, then smiled and shook his head. "It doesn't matter. I'm here now and it was an interesting drive." He made another airy gesture. "And it occurs to me that I'm being unforgivably rude," he added suddenly.

Treize blinked as the other man pivoted on one booted heel and offered his hand across the bonnet of his car. "I'm Feliu Maxwell," he said warmly. "Felix, to everyone except my mother. It's an honour and a pleasure to meet you, Your Grace."

Treize took the hand reflexively. "Treize Khushrenada," he replied. "Thank you."

The younger man's fingers were warm and soft under his own, the grip giving just a pleasant hint of a firm strength and confident personality. Treize let his eyes wander as they released each other, taking in as much as he could of the other man.

Felix was an unquestionably attractive young man, tall and slender and in obviously good shape. Slightly untidy reddish hair fell into his eyes where it had slipped out of the elegant back sweep it appeared to have been styled in. Clear skin held the remains of a summer tan and distinctive split-ended eyebrows arched neatly over intelligent amethyst eyes.

Duo had been right, Treize acknowledged, noting that he was being studied as closely as he was studying, the resemblance between the two of them was a matter of overall effect rather than true likeness. Individually, feature for feature, there was little similarity. Their eyes were of obviously different colours and were probably a different shape, as well. Felix's hair was darker, holding more chestnut and mahogany tones than Treize's strawberry blond ever had and the general had never had a tan in his life. His skin burned at the slightest exposure to sun.

The two of them were, Treize conceded, almost exactly the same height – Felix might have been a half-inch the shorter – and he knew from the fact that he'd been leant the younger man's clothes that they weighed about the same, but their builds were different. Felix wasn't nearly so rangy, showing the promise of maturing into a man more along Zechs's lines – powerful and solid – than the aesthetic spareness Treize knew he was destined for. Certainly, Treize had never dressed the way the younger man was, though the open-necked shirt, sports coat and flannel trousers suited him perfectly.

Treize found himself smiling as he concluded that he wasn't really all that much like this newest member of his family, watched as Felix apparently decided the same thing and returned the smile, and then turned sharply as Zechs gave a bitten off gasp from his post a few feet away.

"Good God," the King said. "I knew there was some resemblance but…." He shook his head and gestured helplessly. "You should see the way you're smiling," he continued. "It's eerie. You're practically mirrors of one another."

Treize frowned. "Do you really think so?" he asked. "I can't see it," he admitted.

Zechs nodded slowly, still looking between the two younger men intently, his eyes focussed sharply in the light. "No wonder Aleks thought you were Felix," he said softly.

The statement provoked a startled laugh from Felix himself. "He did?" he asked, looking surprised. "He didn't tell me that!" he chuckled.

"He wouldn't have," Zechs answered him. "Self-preservation, and all that." He shook himself a little and found a smile of sorts. "I think he must know you too well to give you such easy ammunition. Though it has to be said that I thought Treize was you at first, as well, so don't be too rough with him."

"I'm never too rough with him," Felix replied, and the wicked smirk that was touching his mouth made Treize blink and raise an eyebrow. It wouldn't have taken very much more for the other man's tone of voice to be a sultry purr.

Wondering what was going on there, Treize waited to see what the King would say next, hoping it would give him more of an idea.

Before Zechs could answer, the sound of another car drawing to halt on the gravelled forecourt drew all three men's attention. Treize turned from the Morgan in time to see the near-side front door open and the driver of the car climb out, pausing a moment to stretch out the kinks in his body in a way that was familiar to anyone who had ever had to suffer a too-long car journey.

The autumn sunlight reflected beautifully off the inky blue-black hair that was caught back into a neat plait at the base of the man's scalp. Combined with the spare precision of the man's movements Treize had realised the newest arrival's identity even before the man turned to show austere Asian features and inscrutable black eyes.

"Chang…" Treize breathed, feeling his body tense. More than most, Chang Wufei had reason to be displeased with Treize's sudden arrival. For the general, it hadn't been four days since he'd mercilessly used the Chinese boy as the apparent instrument of his death. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what twenty-five years of dwelling on that usage would have done to Chang's opinion of him.

Caught up in his own thoughts, Treize completely missed the way Zechs's eyes widened in alarm at the sight of the oriental man and the way the King flung silent instructions at Felix before hurrying towards Wufei and catching him by the elbow. He used the grip to turn the oriental man away and began walking him around to the other side of his car before he even had chance to say hello.

The sudden presence of a firm hand on his shoulder made Treize jump in shock. "You look as though you expect him to hit you," Felix said, his voice tinged with laughter and very soft in Treize's ear.

"There's every possibility that he might," Treize answered. "And I suspect I'd deserve it," he admitted. He well knew that what he'd done to the boy had been cruel, but he'd had little choice. Zechs's unexpected refusal to duel had thrown all of Treize's plans into disarray and Wufei, so filled with anger and hatred, had been the only sure option he'd had left.

Felix shook his head, pulling Treize from the course his thoughts were taking before he could get too drawn in. "He wouldn't. It's not in his nature," he explained lightly.

"With you, maybe not," Treize said ruefully. "I might well be a different case. Practically the first thing he ever said to me, after all, was that he was going to kill me. He has cause not to like me very much."

The younger man shook his head again. "He still won't hit you. If he really does dislike you that much, all you'll get is icy silence. He has a thing about physical expression of anger that got both me and Aleks into all ends of trouble when we were younger."

Treize let his surprise at that show openly as he glanced across the forecourt again, his gaze considering as he pondered what might have happened to make a former teenage terrorist take such a stand. He couldn't claim ever to have known Chang well, or even at all, if he were absolutely honest. They'd met face to face but once, and though the boy had left enough of an impression for Treize to recall him some six months later when they met again on the battlefield, that didn't give him any insight into the man's psyche.

Across the top of Wufei's car, the general could just see two heads, silver haired and black, bent together as Zechs and Chang conversed intently. The shorter man shot a swift glance in Treize's direction, frowning as he did so, and then shrugged at the King and nodded his agreement to something. Zechs's face lightened in relief and he smiled his thanks. Treize wondered what he'd asked.

A flash of gold in his eye line made Treize look over his shoulder, away from the two older men and at his younger companion. Felix was smiling impishly as he held his hand up at eye height, his car keys dangling provocatively from slender fingers.

"Want to play?" he offered, his tone of voice and the tilt of his head familiar to Treize from watching Dorothy employ the same approach on reluctant targets for years.

"Play?" Treize asked.

"With the Moggy," Felix clarified. "Come on," he encouraged, giving the keys a little shake. "I saw the way you were looking at her before. I know you want to…."

Treize looked from the keys, to the car and then to its owner, admitting to himself that Felix was right and he did want to try the Morgan. He hesitated, turning his head to look for Zechs and Felix must have caught the gesture because he smiled winningly.

"Don't worry about Uncle Milliardo," he said quickly. "He won't mind if I steal you away for an hour or so, I promise. You can always tell him I bullied you into it!"

"He wouldn't believe me," Treize replied. "I really should wait for him. It would be horribly rude of me to just…."

"Not even if I let you drive?" Felix coaxed. All his body language was pleading, his expression openly entreating, his eyes wide and his smile eager. He looked young, a child trying to include a favourite relative in a much-loved game. The general realised he was wavering, reluctant to disappoint the younger man and trying to decide if it would have been easier or harder if he'd known Felix from childhood.

Treize glanced over at Zechs again, remembering when the blond had been young enough to look at him in the same way, and found himself wondering how many years it had been since he'd been capable of such innocent, unquestioning affection himself.

He could charm when he had to. He could lie through his teeth and make it sound as honest as an oath before God from a priest. He could make his face and body show every shade of emotion that might persuade from shrinking submission to utter command; he'd been well trained to do just that. But it had been a long time, a very, very long time, since he'd been innocent in any regard and that was something that couldn't be faked.

Treize looked steadily at his near double, and then shook his head tiredly. Zechs had talked of teaching Treize to blend in with his peers but if Felix Maxwell was an example of his age mates then the King could kiss that dream goodbye before they ever began. There was less than three years biological age difference between the two men but Treize felt old simply talking to his newest cousin; bitter and sullied, his hands bloody and his soul completely weary.

Some of his feelings must have shown on his face because Felix's smile faded into a tight frown. "Treize?" he asked, slipping his car keys back into his pocket as he reached out with the other hand. "Did I say something I shouldn't have?"

Treize avoided the physical contact by taking a backward step. "No," he replied, rather faster than he should have. "No, not at all. I simply don't feel very well all of a sudden," he said. "Will you excuse me?" he asked, and didn't wait for an answer before he turned on his heel and began making his way up the steps to the palace doors.

He turned his head to look for Zechs when he reached them and caught only a flash of palest gold hair disappearing through another door, followed by Chang and the lithe figure of a tall, red-haired woman. He should have been intrigued by her, his curiosity peaked by the way she seemed familiar from somewhere but, for that moment, all Treize could feel was his isolation and the first wash of a well-known sinking depression.

Ignoring anyone else who might have been about, the former general made his way through the palace with his boots heels clicking swiftly along the floors and shut the door to his borrowed suite behind him firmly as soon as he reached his rooms.


	10. Chapter 10

_A/N: There are discussions in this chapter which may be triggering for some. 13xOMC, with shades of NC._

_._

.

The knock on Treize's door almost an hour later was soft but not tentative; it wouldn't have woken him from a true sleep but it cut through the daze he'd fallen into just by its sheer presence and left him in no doubt as to who his visitor was.

"It isn't locked," Treize called, letting that be invite or not, as it suited, and not troubling to move himself from his sprawl across the surface of the bed when the door opened, not even enough to move the hand he had resting across his eyes.

"Are you all right?" Zechs asked, closing the door behind himself and taking a pace into the room. "Felix said you ran from him like he'd offered to buy your first born."

"I'm fine," Treize answered quietly.

"Yes, and you look it, too," Zechs snorted. He reached out to one side, flicking the switch that would turn on the lights Treize had neglected, and then crossed the room to sit on the edge of the bed much as he had that morning. "You might at least have taken your boots off," he chided gently.

That prompted a reaction from the younger man as he dropped his hand and lifted his head enough to look down himself at the feet that were – Zechs had been right – still clad in their new boots.

Sighing to himself, Treize sat up heavily and began to swing his feet back to the floor. He was stopped before he could bend to tug the first boot free by a firm grip on his shoulder.

"I wasn't serious," Zechs said quietly. "If it suits you to put your boots on your bed sheets, I really couldn't care less. They'll wash." He ducked his head, trying to see his friend properly, and Treize turned away a little more, refusing to meet the enquiring gaze.

"That doesn't excuse the fact that it's bad mannered of me," he replied, and succeeded in freeing first one foot, and then the other. He shook off the King's grip by standing, boots in one hand, and walking across his room to slide them into the bottom of the wardrobe.

Zechs watched him do it in silence, quirking an eyebrow and standing to follow when his former commander headed into his bathroom instead of coming back to the bed. He leaned lightly against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest and eyes intent, saying nothing as Treize reached up to the cabinet above his sink and began rooting through it.

"What are you trying to find?" he asked, when the younger man's search didn't seem to be bearing fruit.

Treize shrugged. "I was only wondering if you had anything stronger than ordinary aspirin in there. It doesn't matter." He raised a hand to his temples and rubbed wearily, then closed the cabinet door again and turned to walk back into the openness of the bedroom.

Zechs didn't move from his position by the door, seemingly unaware that he was blocking the doorway and keeping Treize trapped in the smaller space of the bathroom. "Headache?" he asked sympathetically.

"Obviously," Treize replied. "Excuse me, please," he added, taking another step forward in clear expectation of the King moving out of his way. He was forced to check the movement when the blond didn't budge an inch and the look he cast the King was not entirely friendly.

Zechs didn't appear to notice. "When did it start?" he queried, a small frown setting two deep lines between his eyebrows.

"This morning, before breakfast," Treize said. "It's nothing really, just annoying," he dismissed. "Excuse me," he tried again.

"You didn't say anything," Zechs said in reply, not letting the subject go. "How long ago did you take the aspirin?" he asked, moving only enough to drop his arms and stand up straight.

Treize sighed under his breath. "This morning, and again an hour ago. Zechs…."

The King interrupted him. "And your head still hurts? Is the aspirin helping at all?"

"Not noticeably, no. Zechs, you're blocking the door. Let me through, please."

"I will, in a minute," Zechs answered absently. "Come here and let me look at you, will you?" he asked, reaching out. "Is it just your head, or is there anything else wrong? You said something about feeling sick earlier."

The younger man shook his head and brushed him off with a firm wave of his hand. "Don't fuss, I'm too tired for it. It's a headache, that's all. I'm sure it'll go away on its own if I leave it be." He lifted his head and met the older man's gaze squarely. "Move," he ordered. "I need to get past you."

The King raised a curious eyebrow at the sudden heat in his friend's voice, but he took a step backwards obediently, lifting his hands in surrender as he did so and the red head brushed past him with quick steps.

Treize crossed the bedroom swiftly, heading straight for the wide windows and sinking down to perch on the ledge as he stared out at the striking sunset. Zechs watched him for a moment, then cleared his throat gently, drawing his friend's attention back into the room, and possibly back into the right decade.

Narrowing his eyes at the fact that Treize's breathing was too fast and too shallow, his fingers white in their grip on the drapes, Zechs shook his head. "Just saying 'I don't like small spaces' would have gotten me to move faster, you know," he commented, keeping his tone as neutral as he could. "As a suggestion for the future, you might try setting aside your pride a little and simply being straight with people. I can't read your mind and I had no reason to think you claustrophobic." He moved across the room and leaned over his friend to work the latch on the top half of the window and push it open, letting the cool evening air into the room. "Where did it come from, anyway?"

"Luxembourg," Treize said eventually, apparently intending it to be an explanation. "I suppose." He shrugged weakly. "The tendency has always been there, but…."

"But three months trapped in the same house would probably a good trigger for anybody," Zechs finished, sighing. "All right. I'm sorry. Would you feel better for a walk outside?"

"I'm fine." The younger man took a deep breath and leaned forward to put his forehead against the glass. "It wasn't… one of Dermail's guards liked to play games. He found it funny to trap me into one room, knowing I couldn't risk hurting him to make him move. He was a closet sadist on a power trip, I think, and my bathroom was a favourite target. I had little choice about using that room, even after I learned to avoid all the others with only one door."

The general's voice was expressionless, his face a blank. Zechs found himself cringing a little, and more so when his mind began supplying him with all sorts of possible additions to the scenario the other man had described.

Taking a slow breath, not wanting to ask and knowing he had to, Zechs sank into a crouch by his friend's side, making himself less of a threat as he levelled their heights so they were on the same eye line. "Treize, he didn't… hurt you, did he?" he asked as delicately as he could manage. He couldn't imagine it – or perhaps he simply didn't want to – and it was the one trauma, out of the dozens that they'd been expecting, that none of them had any experience with. Unfortunately, it was a perfect explanation for a very great deal of the behaviour Zechs had seen from the younger man so far.

Treize didn't move for a moment and the hesitation was enough to have the King feeling utterly sick, then the general turned his head and smiled sadly. "Not the way you mean," he said quietly, making Zechs release a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Not more than I knew he would."

"What does that mean?" Zechs pressed carefully.

"Nothing, really," Treize explained wearily. "Epyon," he said, again seeming to expect the one word to explain. "Une. I had very little else in the way of currency," he continued.

For a moment, the King felt confusion reign, then the light dawned and a sudden chill washed through him from the inside out. "Jesus, Treize…." he moaned helplessly as he realised what his friend was saying. " How could you do that?"

The younger man gave a dismissive shrug, his gaze going back to the darkening sky and the grounds of the palace. "It was familiar coin, at least," he offered quietly.

If that was supposed to make the King feel better, it failed miserably. "Jesus!" Zechs said again, and pushed himself to his feet with a snap. He paced across the width of the room swiftly, his footfalls silent on the thick carpet, swamped by the feeling that he absolutely had to move or risk lashing out at exactly the wrong person.

Zechs had never been unobservant, even as a young boy. He'd known from before his tenth birthday that there was something about the workings of the shadowy Romefeller organisation his friend wasn't sharing with him – known, too, that there was some reason Treize had been so adamant in his refusal of membership for Zechs, beyond his insistence that it wasn't safe – but he'd never been able to get the older boy to tell him exactly what. He'd known he was being protected, but what from had been a mystery.

In what he recognised now as a fit of wilful stupidity, he hadn't figured it out even after he and Treize became intimate. He'd thrown fit after fit at the commander over the years, driven to distraction by the fact that, no matter what he said or did, Treize never seemed to consider him worth any degree of faithfulness. Time after time, he'd stood back and watched as his commander flirted with others, drawing them in with his smile and his charm and the promise of his body, watched the older man leave balls and conferences and dinners with his head bent close to another's, his arm around a slender waist or a strong shoulder. He'd become used to letting himself into the older man's rooms of an evening to find him in the shower washing away the marks of another partner; he'd learned to accept Treize coming to bed in the middle of the night, his skin holding the musk of sex and the lingering taint of a woman's perfume or another man's cologne.

And he'd hated it.

He'd lost count of the number of times he'd flown into a rage at his friend, cursing and insulting him, only infuriated more when Treize nodded his agreement placidly and asked him to calm down, his eyes sad and his smile tremulous. So often, he'd left the bed or the room in his anger, tossing furious invective over his shoulder and ignoring Treize's soft pleas for him to stay.

By the time he'd realised the truth of what had been happening, that Treize had traded his body and his bed for influence and power, first on the instructions of his Uncle Dermail, later on his own recognizance, the general had, apparently, been dead for over a year. It had been Dorothy who had told him that such bartering was the stock-in-trade of the Romefeller Foundation, the youth and beauty of the new generation in return for the favour of the old. She'd slapped him soundly for his disgust when he'd learned that Treize had used, not only himself, but both Une and Dorothy as well, mercilessly, and refused to speak to him for several years, leaving Une to make him see that their former commander had been given no other option.

Zechs had come, in the years since, to understand why Treize had done it, but it seemed he'd underestimated how far the other man had taken it, and he'd never known how it had been borne.

A quiet noise behind him made the King turn back to the window.

Treize was looking at him steadily, his eyes shadowed and his smile weak. "You have no idea," he said softly, "how very glad I am that you can still ask me that."

Zechs blinked, caught off-guard. For a moment, the twenty-five years he'd lived without his friend melted away and he found himself feeling young and naïve again in the face of the other man's jaded knowledge.

The sensation faded as Treize winced, closing his eyes as he put a hand to his temples again. "Gods, it's been a long day," he sighed.

"Admittedly," Zechs agreed after a slight pause. He took a step back across the room towards the red head and perched himself on the edge of the bed again. "I have something in my rooms that might clear that headache," he offered. "I'll go and get it in a minute, if you like?"

"Please?" Treize asked. "It's not all that bad but it's driving me to distraction," he confessed.

Zechs gestured his understanding. "The proverbial straw, probably," he suggested. "You have enough to deal with without feeling rough physically. You most likely wouldn't even notice it on any other day. Is that why you came up here?" he asked. "I know you told Felix you weren't feeling well, but he rather thought you were saying it simply as an excuse."

The younger man shrugged emptily. "Partly," he replied, but he didn't elaborate further. "Why did you come up here?" he asked in turn. "Were you just chasing me down?"

The King smiled. "Actually, no," he said. "I came to find out if you were planning to join us for dinner. I meant to tell you about this earlier but the whole family eats dinner together, unless one of us has a prior engagement. Breakfast and lunch are catch as catch can, but we've always made a point of getting together in the evenings." He gestured lightly. "A habit we got into for the sake of the children, mainly, and just never got out of. Seven sharp, every night, and no excuses!" he teased.

"I thought it would be a good chance for you to meet everyone properly," the King explained, when Treize didn't return his smile, "but if you aren't feeling up to it, I can have someone bring a tray up here for you. The family will understand if you're too tired, I promise."

For a few seconds Treize looked at Zechs warily, and the blond was sure he was going to refuse, then the younger man nodded his consent slowly. "No," he said. "I'm all right and I suppose I should at least make an effort to say hello. I'll be fine if you can find me something for my head."

The King smiled warmly. "Done. Come on, then," he instructed and held out his hand as he stood up.


	11. Chapter 11

Zechs hadn't been kidding when he said the entire family got together for dinner.

With the exception of a quick stop at the King's suite – which Treize was surprised to realise was only a few doors down from his own – the older man had guided the younger swiftly through the palace. He'd walked straight past the dining room breakfast had been served in to cross into the north wing of the building and come to a stop before a door Treize had no memory of.

"Brace yourself," the King said impishly and pushed the door open.

The buzz of conversation rose as Zechs stepped into the room, peaked for a moment, and died away to nothing at all as Treize followed him.

Feeling decidedly awkward, the general hesitated just inside the door, scanning the room swiftly and being careful not to let his gaze linger on any one person or intersect with anyone else's. He could feel the weight of their eyes on him, and knew he was being studied.

Zechs put a hand lightly under his elbow, drawing him a pace further into the room so the door could swing shut behind him. "I realise the introduction is a little late and rather unnecessary but for those of you who haven't met him before, Treize Khushrenada," Zechs said steadily. He waited a moment and when the silence continued, he added, "Don't everyone say hello at once then!"

There was an uneasy rustling and a flurry of exchanged sideways glances. Treize tensed and felt Zechs's hand grip a little harder as he registered the reaction, offering wordless support as someone in the back of the room sighed noisily and pushed past Felix's tall figure.

"Oh, honestly. All the lectures you've given me about manners!"

Treize blinked as a small, slender teenage girl stepped into clear view and came towards him without a trace of hesitation, her back straight and her eyes lowered modestly. Her left hand caught up her long skirts as she dropped him a perfect curtsey, her right extending for him to take. "Elena Maxwell, Your Grace," she murmured. "Helen, unless my mother is in the room."

Treize reached for her hand without thinking, the reflex of a lifetime's training, and laid a gentle kiss on the back of it as he drew her carefully back to being upright. "Treize Khushrenada," he answered her, then, very quietly, "and thank you."

The smile she gave him at his words was beaming. "You're welcome." She tilted her head and looked up at him intently, letting him see the dusky purple of her eyes as they flickered back and forwards across his face.

Treize barely registered it when Zechs let him go and took a step back; he was too busy scrutinising the girl in front of him.

There was no mistaking whose daughter she was. The colour of her eyes did nothing to disguise the expression in them and though her hair was burnished gold rather silvery platinum, it hung in a straight, heavy sheet to her hips, drawn back at her ears with two emerald barrettes.

Involuntarily, he glanced over Elena's head to search for Dorothy, and jumped when the girl half turned around to look at her brother. "Kitty, get over here!" she ordered sharply.

Felix rolled his eyes and straightened slowly from his elegant slouch against the back wall. "So loud, Hellion," he chided. "I've already said my hellos but I shall come and say them again if you insist." He handed off the glass of wine he was holding to his father and made his way across the space, pausing only to snare a hand into the arm of another young man standing a few feet away.

Treize couldn't help but look at Elena in puzzlement. "Kitty?" he asked.

"Kitty," she repeated firmly. "Felix-feline-cat-kitty," she explained rapidly. "And because he's just like a cat. Fussy and spoilt and disdainful…"

"Thank you, brat," Felix interrupted. "Hello again, then," he said to Treize, over his sister's head. "Feeling better?"

The younger man had changed clothes since they'd spoken in the courtyard, shucking the sports coat and slacks for a silk shirt and sharply tailored trousers. Treize felt rather underdressed in comparison. "Somewhat," he replied a little awkwardly. "You have my apologies for…"

Felix waved a hand. "Pfft, forget it. We can go for that drive in the morning, I expect." He smiled warmly. "And since no-one else seems to be bothering, I'll make some introductions for you, shall I?" he offered and proceeded to suit word to deed.

Letting go of the boy he'd collared, he gestured to him indicatively. "Your Grace, Aleksander Peacecraft. I believe you've already met but I thought I would make sure you were clear on identities… both of you…"

Treize couldn't help the smile that touched his mouth – there was that teasing Zechs had been expecting. He bit his lip to suppress the reaction and bowed gracefully from the waist. "Your Highness," he murmured. However much he wanted to study this namesake of his, the boy was Crown Prince of a country and the protocol was clear.

The movement stirred the room into unsettled humming; more so when Treize stayed in his bow.

"Let him up, Aleks," Zechs said a moment later, and there was a swift, uncertain touch to his shoulder. Treize straightened, noting that Felix was laughing silently, his sister with him, and that Aleks looked confused and a touch embarrassed.

"We're not so formal a court as you're used to," Zechs explained lightly, directing his words to Treize before switching his attention to his son. "He's Old Blood, Aleks. He can't move without your permission. I should have thought to warn you." He looked back at Treize. "Are you going to do that to everyone?" he asked, nothing in his tone giving away whether he approved or disapproved.

Treize gave a minute shrug. "It rather depends on whether they outrank me," he answered honestly.

Aleks suddenly shook his head at himself. "You're going to be good practice for the Brits next year, I can tell. Remind me to get you to drill me in every other silly tradition that could trip me up!"

"Yes, leaving the British Princess in her curtsey till she wobbles and falls over would be a wonderful way to start your courtship!" Felix laughed and Aleks blushed furiously.

"I would not!"

"She only has to be smart enough to do what I did and put her hand out," Elena commented, looking smug.

Treize, completely lost, looked to Zechs for an explanation. "I'll tell you later," the King said. He took Treize's elbow again and pressed him in the direction of a low velvet couch. "If I'd known you were going to be such a bloody traditionalist, I would have conducted the introductions myself," he groused softly. "What happened to my bow, anyway?" he needled gently.

"You don't count," Treize whispered back. "And these trousers are too new for me to be kneeling in them."

Zechs blinked, then coloured as he realised he'd made exactly the same mistake as his son. Protocol might have demanded Treize bow to Aleks, but Zechs was ruling royalty, without even a consort to share the throne. If the general had stayed with his traditions, he'd have been down on one knee with his neck bent until Zechs gave him permission to move.

"Do me a favour, and keep letting me not count," the King asked, as his memory kept filling in the rest of the code of behaviour Treize was following. "I can do without you hopping about all over the place every time we're in the same room. I abolished that level of formality for a reason."

"All right," Treize agreed.

Zechs stopped in front of the settee and gestured forwards. "Treize, my sister, Relena Peacecraft-Winner, her husband, Quatre Winner, and their daughter, Katerina."

Treize bowed smoothly again, standing when Zechs gave a tug.

Three pairs of blue eyes met his squarely, honest curiosity in one and guarded wariness in the others. Looking to charm, Treize looked first at the owner of the curious pair and smiled warmly. "A pleasure, mademoiselle," he murmured and made the girl giggle.

Katerina Winner couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old but she hid her smile long enough to nod at him in proper regal fashion before giggling again. She looked a true Peacecraft, pretty and blue eyed and with silky blonde hair pulled back into a simple braid.

Her parents, however, didn't look like they were going to be nearly so easy to win over.

Treize had never met Quatre Winner in person, so his first impression of him was as a slender blond man of average height, edging into a stately middle age. There was a weight of experience to his gaze that suggested he was not to be crossed but also an openness that tempered it into something approachable. He offered his hand willingly enough, no real warmth in his smile, and his grip was perfectly firm for exactly as long as it should have been.

"Your Excellency," he murmured and the title was a polite warning. The children might have been willing to accept Treize whole-heartedly, giving him the respect due to another noble with their 'Your Grace's' but Quatre was reminding him that there were those in the room who knew what else he had been and what he was capable of.

"Winner," Treize murmured back, and turned to Quatre's wife.

Relena Peacecraft had aged well from the impetuous teenaged girl Treize had dethroned. Sitting primly in her expensive lilac suit, the hem of the skirt just brushing her knees, back straight and hair swept up into an elegant chignon, she looked like the professional politician she was.

"It is so very strange to be looking at a dead man," she said delicately and her eyes were icy. "How are you finding the world we built?"

Treize flinched and Zechs hissed under his breath. The tension in the room, which had begun to dissipate with the children's greetings, was suddenly palpable again. Somewhere along the line, Relena had made an art form of the politician's insult – not a word out of place but she'd struck straight for the core of the former general.

It took Treize a breath longer than it should have to recover. "Your brother has done an excellent job with the restoration, Mrs Winner," he fired back, his voice as neutral as hers had been. "He's a credit to those that raised him."

"Treize…," Zechs warned softly.

Treize shook his head, holding up a hand to ward off the interruption he could feel the older man preparing "It's not my intention to cause an argument with anyone here," he said to the King, and looked back at the Princess. "To that end, will you let me offer you any apologies that are due, Relena? I did only what I thought was necessary and I've been given to understand that it was a very long time ago."

"Your definition of 'necessary' needs work, General," Relena replied coolly. A heartbeat later, she glanced at her brother and her eyes thawed fractionally. "Yes, I'll let you apologise. I'll even accept it and return my own."

Treize nodded at her, feeling himself relax. If Relena had chosen to take a stand against him it would have made things very difficult and, Lord knew, the woman had little enough reason to be nice to him. They'd only ever had one civil conversation and even that had been harried and emotionally fraught. "Thank you, then," he said softly.

The woman looked at him for a moment, then offered him a small smile. "It might be best if the two of us could talk sometime soon. I think perhaps we should clear the air between us," she glanced at her brother again, "for the sake of our family."

Treize returned the smile, letting his gratitude for her phrasing show through. A subtle use of words, but she'd told him a very great deal in her choice of 'our' rather than 'the' or even 'my' as she would have been entitled to. "At your convenience, ma'am," he replied and held her gaze for before turning away.

Zechs sighed under his breath. "Ouch," he whispered, "sorry."

Treize shook his head wordlessly, knowing his friend had missed the layers and layers of meaning he and Relena had just exchanged. As awkward as their conversation was going to be, Treize could feel himself anticipating it with more than utter dread. Relena had become the skilled opponent she had promised to be.

The King steered him to the matching couch across the room and Treize smiled as Duo grinned up at him cheerfully. "Told ya' it was creepy, Heero," he said brightly. "Good to see you again, general," he added. "Did Blondie finally get round to feeding you breakfast?"

"He did, thank you." Treize looked at the Asian man standing behind Duo. "Yuy," he greeted, knowing, despite the changes in the man, that there was no one else it could be.

"Khushrenada," Heero returned and seemed content to lapse back into silence.

Something about the exchange made Duo bark a laugh but before Treize could ask what was funny, the woman sitting on the other end of the couch had made a sound of pure frustration and sprung to her feet.

"You are not going to say hello to me like one of those old stuffed shirts," she ordered sternly, her eyes flashing in a face that was scarcely less beautiful for the marks the years had left on it. "I won't let you!"

Treize raised an eyebrow at her and then staggered back a pace when she all-but threw herself at him in a swirl of skirts and her hair, wrapping her arms firmly around his neck. "Dorothy…" he started, catching her reflexively and holding her loosely as his eyes cut to her husband in alarm.

Duo shrugged lazily, spreading his hands as if to ask, 'what can you do?' He nodded at the same time and Treize took that as permission to wrap his niece into a proper hug. "Dorothy," he repeated more gently, tasting the familiar syllables as he said them.

Dorothy had her face buried into the shoulder of his sweater, her fingers tight in the fabric at the back of his neck. "I thought you'd died," she moaned. "How could you do that to me? How?" she demanded fiercely. "What were you thinking?!"

Treize closed his eyes in pain. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I couldn't…I had no choice," he explained weakly.

Dorothy pulled back from him, eyes sparkling angrily. "No choice?" she repeated stormily. "No choice?! You bastard!" she spat, her hand cracking across the side of his face hard enough to make both Zechs and Duo wince in sympathy. There was a flood of heated Spanish as Treize saw stars, then, "You didn't even have the courtesy to tell me what you were planning!" she cried and flung herself back into his arms.

This time, Treize caught her without hesitation, pulling her to him and bending his head to hide his face in her long hair. "I'm sorry, Dors," he whispered. "So sorry. I couldn't think of any other way and I didn't think anyone would care."

"Care?" One of her little hands balled up and struck him on the shoulder weakly. "You stupid man!" she exclaimed. "How could we not care? Me, Milliardo, Anne… what were we without you?"

Treize shook his head. "You all seem to have managed well enough, Dors," he replied and even to his own ears, he sounded bitter.

Dorothy growled wordlessly, her slender figure tensing as though she was going to pull away. "Don't make me hit you again," she warned.

"No," Treize said and tightened his hold on her, reluctant to let her go. She was warm in his arms, the scent of her hair familiar and soothing. He couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd been hugged that way, sharing physical contact that was both welcome and comforting and he hadn't realised how much he needed it.

Eyes still shut, Treize drew her up onto her tiptoes, wrapping the two of them together as closely as they could be. His hands shaking suddenly as his self-control began to slip, he slid one arm around her trim waist and lifted the other to curl his fingers into her hair at the back of her head. Dorothy's arms wound back around his neck as she leaned her entire weight into him.

"Stupid man," she whispered again and her slim form began to shake.

Treize drew a ragged breath and let it out as a soft moan. "Oh, don't," he pleaded. "Please. I'm not worth it."

Dorothy nodded wordlessly.

"No, I'm not." Feeling increasingly unsteady, Treize began pushing the woman away from him. "Dors, please," he begged, letting the tone of his voice and the tremor in it tell her what she needed to know and he couldn't say. "I can't do this," he whispered. "Not today."

Dorothy clung to him for another moment, then took a deep breath and stepped back, bringing her hands up to wipe her face as her husband stood up from his seat on the couch and took her into his own hold.

Duo bent his head to whisper in her ear for a few seconds, then looked up at Treize and smiled. "If she cries half so much for me when I die, I'm going to consider this a successful marriage," he quipped.

The general stared at him blankly, and only dimly saw Duo's eyes flick to someone over his shoulder, not registering that the gesture meant anything until a large, warm hand touched him between the shoulder blades.

"Are you all right?" Zechs had appeared from somewhere and was standing side on to the smaller man, blocking him from the rest of the room, which, Treize was becoming aware, had fallen into an uncomfortable silence.

Squaring his shoulders, Treize blinked quickly and nodded, noting absently that a family dinner shouldn't take more effort than handing his resignation to Dermail in front of the Romefeller council had.

"Do you need a minute?" Zechs continued. "I swear to God, if I'd known it was going to be like this…" he apologised helplessly.

"I'm fine," Treize interrupted. "It isn't your fault and this was never going to be easy." He forced a smile. "Where were we?"

For a moment, the King stared at his friend intently, then shook his head slowly and took a step to one side. "That's it, ask me to make it worse," he said under his breath. He beckoned to the last group of people, who had been sitting gathered around a small coffee table in the very back of the room. They came to their feet as the King gestured to them, and crossed the room to stand in front of the two men.

"Treize, Chang Wufei, his wife, Marie and their son, Chang Wei Ning."

"Khushrenada," Chang said calmly. "It's pleasing to see you again."

"Likewise," Treize managed, bracing for another outpouring of emotion. The Chang of his memory had been a rather excitable boy.

"You needn't cringe so, Khushrenada," Wufei laughed, apparently registering the reaction. "I'm not one for making scenes like Maxwell's woman. I shall instead repeat the Princess's offer and suggest that the two of us would do well to speak frankly to one another in the near future. Perhaps you might join me for tea in the next few days?"

Relieved, Treize simply nodded.

"Excellent. There are several matters we need to discuss, I think." He smiled with more warmth and openness than Treize would have thought him capable of and reached for his wife's hand.

The lithe red-haired woman Treize had spied in the courtyard reached back immediately but her eyes never left Treize's face.

"An honour to meet you, madam," the general said, returning the scrutiny and wondering who she was. Of everyone in the room, she was the only one who wasn't either an old acquaintance of some sort, or the child of one. It made him wonder at the inclusion of both her and Chang in what Zechs had called a 'family' dinner. There had been, after all, others who had a stronger connection to Treize who weren't there, Lady Une as an example, and if it were merely because the oriental man had been a gundam pilot, then there was one of their number missing as well.

Treize looked more closely at the woman, because he couldn't shake the feeling that she was familiar from somewhere, and found himself looking directly into her eyes. The colour was a stunning rich blue, as clear as fine sapphire. "Likewise, sir," she said throatily and the sense of déjà vu increased.

"Now that I think about it," Wufei said, breaking the line of thought, "it occurs to me that I may just have found a tutor in European swordplay for my son who's worth the title. If I can persuade you to the post, that is. Milliardo has maintained for years that you were his teacher and he is an acceptable standard."

Zechs snorted rudely in reply. "You only say that because I beat you half the time."

"And lose the other half, but that is precisely my measure," Wufei explained. "Think about it, please," he asked Treize.

The general, caught completely off-guard, suddenly shook his head. "I don't need to think about it!" he said. "If you'd be willing, I'd be delighted! If you can give me time to find my bearings and put in a little practice, it would be an honour!"

Wufei smiled again. "Merely fitting," he answered cryptically, then turned to the King. "May we eat now?" he asked bluntly.

Zechs laughed, glanced back over his shoulder at the others in the room, and nodded. "Yes, you glutton. Twenty years, and I still don't know where you put it!"

"I thought Maxwell solved that riddle years ago," Wufei replied. "In my hollow legs!" He made his way to the far side of the room, pushing open the door that was set into the wall and revealed a pretty little dining room, just big enough to take the table that was set in the middle of it and be snug.

Sparkling glassware and silver cutlery gleamed in the lights thrown from the candle set on the table and Treize smiled. It had been a long time since he'd sat down to a properly presented meal.

A slender hand tucked itself into his arm and he looked round to see Felix had come up next to him. A moment later, Aleks stepped into his other side, bracketing him between them. "And now you've done with all that stuff and nonsense," Felix said airily, "you can come and sit with us and talk about something more interesting. My new car, for example, and when we're going to take you out on the town."

Treize blinked, realised he was being told and not asked, and acquiesced with good grace.


End file.
